Project Kenai at JavaOne

2009-06-09T02:23:36+00:00

It’s just the beginning and a small milestone, but it’s a goal we set for ourselves by JavaOne last week that we reached: 10K registered users at http://kenai.com/. We were fortunate to be highlighted in the Tuesday afternoon keynote, which, to our collective relief, went off without a hitch. I also had a chance to speak a bit about Project Kenai behind the scenes in my technical session.

My slides are available and contain a decent overview of what we’ve been doing. One slide in particular seems to have surprised some folks: our codebase metrics.

12K lines of application code (everything in app/{controllers,models,helpers})
10K lines of views (HTML + template code in app/views)
1K lines of custom Javascript (public/javascripts excluding jQuery and plugins)
8K lines of test code (RSpec + plain text stories) (yes, we’re upgrading to Cucumber)
73.7% test coverage

If you’re doing Rails, you’re probably not all that surprised by these numbers; hopefully you’ve seen similar ones yourself. If you haven’t tried Rails, consider a site like kenai.com and ask yourself if you could build and maintain a production site like it with these numbers in your favorite language/framework.

Other takeaways from my talk:

Use Java what it’s good for; in this case, long-running server apps. The downtime of the JRuby/GlassFish-deployed Rails application has been minimal for us; the few cases where we’ve had issues, they’ve usually been self-inflicted application problems. Instead of running Monit with a pack of Mongrels that need to be periodically recycled, we run a few GlassFish domains per server and only recycle them when we deploy new code.
For the Java programmers out there, don’t be afraid to use stuff other than Java. We use Python, Django, Memcached, Perl, and anything that gets the job done.
You can build cool stuff quickly with community Rails plugins like attachment_fu, geokit, and will_paginate. Not news to Rails programmers, but I’d be interested to hear of any equivalents for Java-based web frameworks.
JRuby is a big win, allowing co-development on MRI and JRuby with deployment to GlassFish. JRuby’s java integration also allows for neat tricks like image_voodoo, a pure-Java imaging plugin for attachment_fu.

Project Kenai: Open for Business

2008-10-19T18:30:52+00:00

Project Kenai

Project Kenai has been open for business for over a month, and I’m just writing about it now?

Blogging is hard. Let’s go shopping, m’kay?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/zen/1229934/ on flickr

There’s no excuse for not writing until now about the JRuby on Rails project that’s kept me busy at work since I joined Sun almost 18 months ago. (Ok, there are a few lame ones. Twitter. Conference travel. Presidential political news distractions. Also, Tim’s write-up filled in my side of the story immediately after the launch.)

So, better late than never. Actually, by looking back on the first month of operation I think that I can give you a better idea of where we’re going, supported by what we’ve done (as well as what we haven’t done), rather than what I might have said we’re going to do.

Word of Mouth

One thing we haven’t done is put the heavy Sun marketing blitzkrieg operation to work on our behalf. Word has made its way around the blogs, and even onto a few tech news sites, but we’re still in a growth phase for the project, and we’d rather earn respect quietly through a site that people find useful instead of shouting the word from the mountain tops.

We have established that we intend to embrace change, having deployed three additional releases since launch. During that time, we’ve added a new feature, fixed bugs and UI inconsistencies, and worked on performance and infrastructure issues.

We’ve also seen community participation grow. We’ve had over 2100 people join, 79 projects have been created, and we’re starting to see real activity in those projects. These are modest but respectable numbers.

JRuby on Rails

As you’ve heard, kenai.com runs on JRuby and Glassfish and uses bits of software I’ve worked on like activerecord-jdbc, Warbler and JRuby-Rack. Having worked on JRuby itself and Rails support for JRuby for a couple years now, this is a personal validation of all that work. One of the things I’ve relished the most working on Project Kenai for the past year is to be able to build infrastructure software for and based upon real-world use. The JRuby story continues to get stronger every day, with things like thread-safety in the upcoming Rails 2.2 release adding fuel to the fire.

(Not Yet) More Than Just a Forge

One of the things that might have caught your eye when you came to the site is the slogan More Than Just a Forge. That’s silly, you might say to yourself. What do they have here that I can’t get at another project hosting site? And if you said that, I’d heartily agree with you – the marketers are just getting a little antsy.

However, that doesn’t mean we don’t have plans. For now, we’re taking the Gmail Launch strategy, starting with a simple, solid foundation, and gradually inviting more and more to participate, stabilizing and growing the platform, and soliciting feedback from our user base. We do already have a healthy amount of requests on our UserVoice page, and while we hope to make good on a number of those, we also plan to do some new things that aren’t being done elsewhere. Stay tuned, and I hope to be able to reveal some more in the coming months as we start to roll out the implementation of those plans.

In the meantime, if you’d like an invite to create a project, drop me an email. If you have comments or requests, you can share them with me privately via email, on the site in the forums, or on our UserVoice page.