Monthly Archives: August 2011

oXygen’s Excellent Example of a Release Timeline / ChangeLog Page

As I was recently downloading a new version of the excellent oXygen XML editor (which I used to write my “Migrating Apps to IPv6” book for O’Reilly), I was struck by how great their Release Timeline” page is. It’s truly a thing of beauty. You can easily see release dates for every major release going back to the beginning of the product (well, okay, they’ve collapsed some of the early 1.x, 2.x, 3.x, etc. releases) and with a single click on the release number can see the release notes for that particular version.

OXygenreleasetimeline

Kudos to the oXygen team for making it so easy to get to this kind of information!

Node.js Knockout Contest Coming Up August 27 – Will You Compete?

NodejsknockoutDo you know Node.js? If so, have you thought about joining the Node.js Knockout contest starting on August 27th?

It’s basically a 48-hour contest to see which team can create the most awesome Node.js application, as decided by a panel of judges. The contest rules explain all the details and as I write this post there are 321 teams entered in this year’s event. Teams can be virtual – and some are gathering in various locations around the world to hack in the same physical place. There is apparently still room to sign up, although it’s closing soon (8/20).

While I’m not personally joining this year, I’m looking forward to seeing what these teams come up with. It should be fun to see!

P.S. In full disclosure, I should note that Tropo.com, one of the services of my employer, Voxeo, is one of the sponsors of the Node.js Knockout.

Dulwich – a native python way to access Git repositories

Ever wanted to manipulate Git repositories directly in python? Well, okay… I haven’t really myself, but in writing about Google Code’s support for git yesterday, I noticed that they are using Dulwich, a native python implementation of git. Rather than wrapping command-line git with python scripts, Dulwich is a python module giving you direct access to a git repository. As shown in the Dulwich tutorial, creating a new repo is simply this:

>>> from dulwich.repo import Repo
>>> from os import mkdir
>>> mkdir("myrepo")
>>> repo = Repo.init("myrepo")
>>> repo
<Repo at 'myrepo'>

Once a repo is created (or you connect to an existing repo), you can do what you would do with git at the command line: adding files to the repo, committing files, and changing files.

While I don’t know that I personally will use this… it’s very cool that Dulwich is out there for python programmers who want to interact with git repos. Very cool to see!

Google Code Now Supports Git for Hosted Projects

Being a big fan of Git for version control, I was very pleased to see the announcement last week that projects hosted at Google Code can now use git in addition to subversion and mercurial (see also Google Code’s GitFAQ). I had looked at hosting projects on Google Code in the past, but chose not to specifically because git was not an option. While I personally am quite happy using Github for project hosting, it’s always good to see other services supporting git:

Googlecodeandgit

Way to go, Google Code!