Edward Hieatt's blog
Tim Ferriss (author of "The 4-Hour Workweek" and lots more) recently posted an interview with Pivotal's CEO Rob Mee on his blog titled "What's Your Start-up's Bus Count? Seven Myths of Entrepreneurship and Programming". It's a great read on how Pivotal Labs thinks about building fast, scalable software development teams and how commonly held beliefs are often counterproductive. Thanks for the post, Tim!
Because of a conflict with another similar application, we've renamed our CI Monitor application (which I blogged about here) to, appropriately enough, "CIMonitor".
The GitHub project is here: http://github.com/pivotal/cimonitor
CI for the project is here: http://ci.pivotallabs.com:3333/builds/CiMonitor
The Tracker project hasn't moved, but has been renamed: http://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/2872
We'd like to congratulate Mavenlink, one of our clients, for being chosen as a finalist for TechAmerica High-Tech Innovation Awards. Mavenlink (http://www.mavenlink.com) provides an online workspace that helps businesses and their consultants collaborate better. We've really enjoyed our ongoing work with the Mavenlink team, and we're excited about Mavenlink's progress!
A while back I blogged about Pivotal's internal CI aggregator, which we use to display the status and history of the builds of all the different projects we're working on. In additional to our internal instance, we have another instance of it running at ci.pivotallabs.com that shows the status of various open-source projects that we maintain or depend on.
We got a lot of interest from people who wanted to run an instance of this CI aggregator app, which we call "Pulse", at their own company. Well, we've now done the work to open-source the application. You can access it here:
git://github.com/pivotal/pulse.git
There's documentation on that page that describes how to install and use the app.
Pulse's CI is here and it's shown, of course, on an instance of itself at http://ci.pivotallabs.com.
The public Pivotal Tracker project for Pulse is here.
Please let us know your feedback!
Yesterday we held a TUG over lunchtime at our San Francisco offices. The subject was "Tracker 101". Thanks to all those who came; some good questions came up, and we hope you found it useful!
We've moved JsUnit from SourceForge (where it's been hosted for over 8 years) to GitHub, under Pivotal's account:
http://github.com/pivotal/jsunit
The motivation is (1) to bring JsUnit development more officially in-house at Pivotal Labs, where it has a better chance of getting more attention than it has historically, and (2) to more easily allow the wider community to contribute.
Fork away!
Next Tuesday, July 14, at 10pm PST, Chris Sepulveda from Pivotal Labs will be broadcasting an O'Reilly WebCast on automated unit testing with the Palm Mojo SDK. Developer testing is at the heart of Pivotal Labs's development practices, and we're excited to be involved in bringing testing to Mojo development. The WebCast will cover the following:
- Introduce BDD & Jasmine
- Installing Jasmine & add related code to the app to support BDD
- Discuss how to write a failing test first, then add functionality to make a test pass
- Develop a simple webOS application test first, with the Mojo SDK
There's more information about the WebCast on webOSHelp.net.
Date: Tuesday, July 14th at 10 am PT
Price: Free
Duration: Approximately 60 minutes
To register: http://oreilly.com/go/palmmojo
We had a great time at GoGaRuCo yesterday. If you don't know already, we're live-blogging the conference at pivotallabs.com/gogaruco/blog. Follow along again today as we continue documenting the conference!
GoGaRuCo is being held in the Swedish American hall in San Francisco. It's a great venue. Here we are demoing Tracker at lunchtime yesterday.
We had fun during lunch at GoGaRuCo talking to people about Tracker and demoing the app. Especially cool were the awesome Viking chairs we got to sit it.
Thanks to Ryan, David S and Chad for helping out!
The first talk of the conference is by Rich Kilmer on MacRuby & HotCocoa.
He's starting out by talking about the history of Apply and Ruby. The first time a version of Ruby was shipped with OS X was in 2002: Ruby 1.6.7 was shipped with OS X version 10.2. The next big development was in 2007, when Ruby 1.8.6, RubyGems, RubyCocoa and Rails were shipped with OS X version 10.5. Later this year, SnowLeopard will include Ruby 1.8.7, RubyGems, RubyCocoa and Rails 2.2.
Rich is telling us that one of Apple's goals is to make OS X the best platform for Ruby developers. Another is to make Ruby a first-class Cocoa programming language on OS X. He hopes that it will become the best Cocoa programming language - a pretty tall order.
RubyCocoa
Now we're diving into the history of RubyCocoa, by Fujimoto Hisakuni. It first emerged in 2001. It provided a bridge between Ruby and Objective-C. Rich is telling us that the first version of the installer wasn't great - it managed to delete his entire /Library directory. RubyCocoa first shipped with Leopard. Rich is showing us a RubyCocoa Hello World implementation. Wow, it's really long - about 20 lines. It's barely visible to people at the back of the room!
Rich is describing the problems with RubyCocoa. First, it's a bridge. Second, its messaging syntax is different. Third, Ruby uses green threads. Lastly, you ended up with 2 runtimes and 2 garbage collectors, which caused problems. In a nutshell, you could build apps with RubyCocoa, but probably not large, complicated ones.
MacRuby
Then MacRuby hit the scene. MacRuby 0.4 is built on top of Objective-C 2.0 and Ruby 1.9. Every Ruby class/object/method is an Objective-C class/object/method. That's great, because you get the dynamism of Ruby with the runtime and speed of Objective C: much better than a bridge.
Now we're seeing a MacRuby implementation of Hello World. Well, it's still about the same amount of code. There's still a lot of code around wiring things together and configuring things.
HotCocoa
And now, enter HotCocoa. Rich is showing us how to refactor the MacRuby Hello World example into HotCocoa. He's removing lots of code, bit by bit, and looking more and more like plain Ruby. Actually, it's looking a but Rails-y in places (e.g.
win = window :title => 'hello world', :frame => [0, 0, 200, 60]
He's down to 7 lines now of pure Ruby. Rich is telling us how a lot of the excitement around HotCocoa is because of its ability to simplify the configuration of your code.
Installing HotCocoa
Rich is giving us a live demo, using HotConsole (available on GitHub), of HotCocoa. HotConsole is written in HotCocoa. He's running simple Ruby code such as
{}.methods
and how he's also running code such as
w = window :title => 'hello' b = button :title => 'push me'
Hey presto, a window pops up with a button labeled "push me" on it. Rich gets a round of applause!
MacRuby Experimental
Rich is going on to talk about MacRuby 0.5. Over Christmas break, Laurent stargin building a new VM for MacRuby, based on LLVM. He already has a functioning replacement for YARV. Other parts of Ruby 1.9 are being replaced with Objective-C code also (such as the garbage collector and built-ins). The JIT is actually just generating machine code, which means it's really fast: about 4 to 5 times faster than Ruby 1.9 (the goal is to pass them all). It won't use any libffi for external calls. It's passing many RubySpecs already. Laurent is also going to make it fully re-entrant and implement fully concurrent threading. His goal is to automatically generate Grand Central code.
All this could lead to some exciting developments, such as, in Rich's words, the ability to run Ruby on a "small device that runs OS X on a cellular network" :)
We're out of time for Rich's talk. He's suggesting that you go to macruby.org to learn more.
There's a gig round of applause as Rich leaves the stage. Break time now!