codeBeamer 5.4, Collaborative ALM Solution, released
Intland Software announces the availability of codeBeamer 5.4, the award winning Collaborative Application Lifecycle Management Solution for distributed software development.
codeBeamer version 5.4 is our answer to recent changes in the software development market and to customer requests.
We believe that some of the new features, like improved support for the popular distributed version control systems or our shiny new issue escalation mechanism, make this codeBeamer version unique in the market. Besides that, we brought our source code management to the enterprise scale by performing all long running tasks in background processes. Today's challenge is to tackle Android sized projects with 2GB of code and hundreds of thousands of change sets, and codeBeamer 5.4 is capable of processing these repositories.
Version highlights
- Issue escalation with hierarchic working calendars
- Calculated tracker fields with rich formula
- Wiki page editing directly in Microsoft Word
- Scalable version control management
- Major enhancements in supporting Git and Mercurial
- Revised search: more relevancy, richer query syntax, friendlier interface
Watch a short video about the highlights on YouTube
Links
JIRA to codeBeamer Converter available
JIRA (developed by Atlassian) is one of the most popular issue trackers in the enterprise, if not
the most popular one. JIRA is a great tool when all you need is an
issue tracker, but it's a focused product, and the story ends here. In
real life, talking to our customers, we frequently see this evolution:
the team starts with an issue tracker, it streamlines their processes,
soon the demands for even better processes start to grow, and finally
they are in the market looking for a complete solution that solves all (or most) collaboration problems with a single razorsharp cut (think of Hattori Hanzo :-)).
codeBeamer is one of those solutions. Besides incorporating an issue tracker, it provides you with:
- document management
- version control with Subversion, Git, Mercurial and more
- wiki
- continuous integration
- forums
- and so much more
After
a short evaluation period, people starts to realize the strengths of
having just one low-cost tool for all these, but then comes the next
big problem: as always the value is not in the tool itself, but in
their data. So, "we like your stuff, but we already have 175,000 issues
in JIRA, where do we go from here?"
ArchitectGroup,
our awesome partner in sunny South Korea, has the answer. They built a
migration tool to convert your existing JIRA issues to codeBeamer
issues. Read the full article
Enterprise messaging with codeBeamer
codeBeamer has a long history of providing extension- and customization points, most importantly a web service based Remote API and a Listener API
. Reactions from the developer community have always been very
positive, but a question we regularly hear from them is: "Look, I want
to listen to codeBeamer events. I know this is perfectly possible in
the same JVM where CB runs, but now I need to do this in an external
application. How can I receive notifications in external applications?"
Well, until now, this was not possible: events were not published outside CB's own JVM.
To satisfy this popular request, recently we developed a Java Message Service (JMS) publisher component.
After you have configured and activated the JMS publisher, CodeBeamer
will send a standard JMS message to a configurable topic each time an
internal event is fired. External applications can subscribe to these
topics, and then they will get notified about every interesting event.
Please note that this pub-sub model and messaging
in general are standard and proven techniques in Enterprise Application Integration. Just Google it for more information.
Read the full article
Project management and Gantt charts with codeBeamer
Just recently, Armin Müller of ScopeSET has started to blog about the codeBeamer extensions he developed in connection with ScopeSET's OpenAmeos community platform. In the first article of this new series, he writes about integrating GanttProject
, a free desktop project management software, and codeBeamer, our Collaborative ALM tool, to provide a comprehensive project management solution.
Generally speaking, the awesome tracker functionality in codeBeamer makes it a perfect choice for project management. CodeBeamer makes it easy to monitor tasks, manage resources, regulate issue escalation, and measure conformance to
Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Unfortunately, the lack of fancy Gantt charts has traditionally been a serious shortcoming for many people, but the open system approach that we keep repeating as our mantra here at Intland, helps to overcome this limitation as well: Armin took an existing tool, and used our
web service API to bridge between GanttChart and the serverside.
Armin
developed a simple import-export application that uses an XML file to
transfer and synchronize information between codeBeamer and GanttChart.
Even
better, ScopeSET decided to open source their project and move it to
JavaForge. You can read Armin's original post on the topic here: http://www.scopeset.de/blog/?p=31
Important! We are keen to learn more about the solutions you are developing to integrate with codeBeamer. If you want to chat about it, please drop us a line to info at intland.com. We are all ears!
Installing codeBeamer on Solaris
Here is a useful article for all users of the Sun Solaris operating system.
Professor Alexander Verbraeck, head of the Simulation Group at the University of Technology in Delft, shares a step by step tutorial about installing codeBeamer on Solaris 10. This is worth reading if you are not installing on Linux or Microsoft Windows. (Note: to run codeBeamer, all you need is a Servlet Specification 2.4 compliant Java servlet container and a MySql or Oracle instance. That means plenty of options and painless integration to nearly any enterprise environment.)
Speaking of Solaris and the Sun ecosystem, you probably know that Intland is also a strategic NetBeans partner. codeBeamer has a dedicated module for NetBeans (and a plugin for Eclipse
), which integrates Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) features to
your favourite IDE. According to our user surveys, with NetBeans and
Eclipse we cover the predominant part of the market. Is there another
IDE out there we should not overlook? Interesting links
Efficient
team working is our passion, we love to practice it, to learn about it
and to chat about it. Here is a selection of interesting news from the
collaboration space, that keep us excited. We hope these might be
interesting for you as well.
Mercurial in pure Java - this is a long thread on the Mercurial mailing list discussing whether it makes sense to reimplement Mercurial,
a very popular Distributed Version Control System, in pure Java (its
original language is Python). Mercurial's biggest competitor, Git
already has a Java implementation, appropriately named JGit, so it's possible to deliver pure Java solutions based on Git's technology, but it can't currently be done with Mercurial.
Google Wave Starts Rolling, Picks Up Over 100,000 New Riders - many people think Google Wave
might be greatest thing since email in collaboration. Now Google has
invited another 100,000 users to beta test Wave. Early reports say the
quality of the app increased dramatically.
SpringSource Launches Enterprise Java Cloud - after their successful acquisition by VMware, the Spring Source roller coaster did't stop. Recently they launched Cloud Foundry, which is a cloud based Java web app hosting offering. Cloud Foundry is more restrictive than deploying on native Amazon EC2
, where you have absolute control over your virtual machines starting
from the operating system level, but it is more flexible than Google App Engine,
which is shockingly limited in some features, but promises incomparable
scalability in turn. As Intland is dedicated to the cloud approach, we
are glad to see increasing competition in this space.
Distributed Version Control Systems: A Not-So-Quick Guide Through
- this is a fairly old article, but it is still one of most
comprehensive ones. Some historical background, a comparative analysis
of the leading technologies (of that time), and tons of valuable links.
Highly recommended!
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