For the past four weeks we have been working on our next product. In order to not get too excited about releasing early, we’ve given it the internal name of “Project Alpha”.
Project Alpha (name to be announced soon) is a Hosted Subversion system, making it easy for anyone to setup, browse, track, and manage Subversion repositories. We are looking for Beta Testers. If you are interested, email me.
Focus on integration
The initial focus of the product was to make it easy for Team Leads to setup and manage repos. We’ve expanded the product to include close integration with systems like Fogbugz, Lighthouse, and Basecamp built-in from the start. The need for integration was internally focused, we required a better tool to view diffs and perform code reviews directly from our bug tracking system (Fogbugz). WebSVN just wasn’t doing it for us.
Alpha also has some nice features like RSS commit feeds, improved commit email notifications, source browsing with code highlighting, and some very nice interface features. Here are a few screen shots.
Dashboard
The dashboard shows recent commit activity for all repositories. Each repo will be assigned a color (Mac OS X style) to identify it visually within the history of commits. From this page a new repository can be quickly created or you can jump to any project.
Repository Overview
The overview is similar to the dashboard, except specific to this repository. For management purposes, we have a list of all team members on the right along with their last commit. Each revision has a show/hide slider to view the files affected.
Viewing a changeset
A detailed changeset is displayed for each revision, which shows files affected and the diffs for each file. Simple icons were used to show if files were added, removed, or modified. You can also view any related commits from that day in the right column. Changsets can be browsed by using the previous and next arrows underneath the large revision number.
File browsing
Simple file browsing is available, with the addition of well supported code highlighting and convenient access to the last five changes for that file in the right column.
Getting your hands on it
We are releasing a private beta soon. When it is ready, it will be launched as a hosted subscription-based service with free and paid accounts. We are thinking about a free single project installable version as well, but have not made up our minds yet.
If you are interested in the Private Beta, please email me and provide some details on how you might use the system (size of team, number of repos, etc).