Any developer worth their salt uses three basic tools:
- Concurrent Versioning
- Issue \ Bug Tracking
- Project Mgmt Tools
For many, the top choices are Subversion (svn), Trac, and Basecamp, respectively. I consider these tools to be the holy trinity of professional software development, as they stay out of the way and let you do what you need to do. The best of breed tools these might be, but the only one that does it right is Basecamp. Why? Cause they make it pleasently easy to setup and use. Its all hosted for you, so the pain of installation and configuration is taken away.
For ease of use, including the install and config process, the other tools fall woefully short. I’ve had issues with installing svn and trac, to say the least. From misconfigured swig files to faulty apache configurations, I was becoming bald by pulling out my hair. Trac is especially hidious to install and configure (mostly configure), whereas svn slightly less unnerving, yet both tools are so complelling in the open source community that they’ve quickly become a defacto standard for software developers.
With the obvious large audience in hand, it saddens me that the developers of these tools don’t really do much in the way to ease the the install\config process. For example, Trac has just released their 0.10 release with minimal documentation on upgrading or fresh installation.
Frustrated as I was, I was thrilled to find Assembla, a group of developers that collect these rouge best of breed tools and allow you to use them in a hosted platform, ala Basecamp. Config? Nope. Cost? Nada. Just sign up, send invites to your teammates, and you’ve got yourself svn and trac ramped up and ready to go.
So what’s the catch? From what I’ve gathered thus far, I cannot find a fault. The service is build around a Ruby on Rails mgmt web app, with features that tie directly into your totally configurable install of trac\svn. Want typo? Its there too! Will this stick around is the the big question? New companies and projects come and go faster than you can say web2.0. Security, above all else, is the primary concern. Again, they seem to have it locked down. Trac is setup with .htpasswd apache files, so you’ve got auth for trac. They could do more to support sensitve areas by serving up under https. For now, I’m going to get started on trac’ing my bugs, which is all I wanted to do in the first place.
Overall, assembla is a godsend.