New xhaus.com open source software portal.
I’m delighted to announce the opening of the xhaus.com open source software portal.
On the portal you will find source code, documentation, issue trackers, etc, for open source software that we have published.
To run our open source portal, we use the excellent Redmine, an open source project management system written with Ruby on Rails. One thing we particularly like is that the Ruby community uses Redmine extensively, meaning that they subscribe to the philosophy of eating their own dog food, an admirable trait in the open source world.
We host our instance of Redmine on jruby, running on Apache Tomcat 6.0.
We chose Redmine because it is a highly functional and well architected piece of software. Browsing the source code for redmine shows that it is well designed and highly extensible, with a range of plugins for different tasks. Moreover, it has a rich feature set, including
- Multiple projects
- Hierarchical projects
- Forums
- Issue trackers
- Wiki
- File and Document areas
- News
- lots of other great features
Many thanks to the Redmine developers for their great software!
Being avid pythonistas, we normally like to use python or jython software when possible. In the case of project management, the obvious choice would be Trac, which was the first software of it’s type in the market, and in many ways defined the space that Redmine occupies.
But Trac has many problems, the most restrictive being that it can only support single projects (unless one is willing to do a fair amount of hacking). Furthermore, the Trac code base is getting a little crufty, a problem which is exacerbated by the fact that authors focus on changing the technologies on which Trac is built, rather than on adding new functionality that is useful to the end user.
So we invite you to visit the xhaus.com open source software portal.