Yoav has also participated in my Agile ALM Connect speaker Q&A series.  He answers my questions about Artifactory and his company JFrog.

1. You are the founder of the Artifactory open source project.   Why did you decide to create Artifactory?

I started Artifactory in 2006. I was working as a consultant at the time and migrated a couple of large client projects from Ant to Maven 2. I was frustrated by the absence of good options to manage dependencies and hosting artifacts in house. There were a couple of tools out there, but they all lacked basic features such as searching and artifact uploading and were basically very immature, since the whole domain of Binary Repository Managers, didn’t exist yet.
In an effort to fill this gap I decided to go and write my own tool as an open source project and created Artifactory. The quick adoption of Artifactory lead me to create JFrog around it. Actually, the final straw that pushed me to start the project was a complete outage of the Codehaus server for a couple of days, which left some of my clients in the dark as they depended on artifacts from the Codehaus repository which they removed from their local caches.

2. We hear a lot about continuous delivery and devops.   How is this effecting the build process and what issues do you think need to be considered?

We are dealing a lot with continuous delivery in JFrog as part of our Artifactory on the cloud service, Artifactory Online. For us, the main effect on the build process is that artifacts are deployed much more frequently, which makes good binary management critical.

Artifactory, as a repository manager is not just the target to which build results are deployed for usage by dependent builds, but also the source from which applications are deployed to production, and even where RPMs are installed from to newly provisioned machines. We are using the properties feature of Artifactory to tag artifacts that were moved to production so that they can be easily identified. Another important aspect is that snapshots can often be treated as releases, and so traditional staging/release workflows no longer fit the requirements of continuous deployment.

3. If someone wanted to get started with Artifactory where would you suggest they start?

I think the best starting point would be downloading Artifactory from jfrog.com and watching this one-minute setup screencast. For someone who has never used a binary repository and wants to understand the benefits of using a tool like Artifactory, I’d suggest looking at this short intro. Other than that, Artifactory is real easy to set up and get up to speed with, and the online help in the UI makes it really useful to understand how to get around. Finally, there is of course the user guide and the users forum for getting more help.

When we put together the program committee for Agile ALM Connect we specifically wanted an expert from the DevOps community to make sure the program had a healthy devops slant.   Therefore, I was thrilled to have Lukes Kanies, the founder of Puppet and CEO of PuppetLabs, agree to be on the program committee and also speak at Agile ALM Connect on ‘what is devops’ and introduce Puppet.    We will also have Kenn Hussey talk about Geppetto, an Eclipse-based Puppet IDE.

In my Q&A series with Agile ALM Connect speakers, Luke answered three questions about DevOps.

1. ‘DevOps’ is a term that is used quite a bit lately.  How do you describe the term DevOps and why should developers care?

DevOps is in to operations what Agile is to development.  Operations needs to be a competitive advantage, adopting new technology quickly and with minimal business interruption, but in many cases the business goals have been lost and the new focus on policy and compliance has allowed IT to become a cost center.  DevOps is about operations teams working closely with everyone involved in product delivery to make sure that business needs come first.  This often involves a lot of automation, but the main thing is about making sure the customer comes first, just like in agile development.

Developers should care because organizations following devops practices will do a better job of supporting them, getting their software deployed faster and more easily.

2. You are the founder of the Puppet open source project.   Why did you start Puppet?
When I started Puppet, the tools and practices in IT had barely changed in ten years.  I was afraid that it would still not have changed in ten more years, and I saw an opportunity to build a better tool and help make the lives of sysadmins better.   Based on how passionate our user base, we seem to have struck a chord.

3. What advice do you have for people that want to learn how to use Puppet? 
First, start small, and fix the most painful things first.  Trying to boil the ocean by automating your whole infrastructure will just frustrate you and have little reward, but if you start by automating the small, menial work in your infrastructure you’ll have quick rewards and, even better, more time available in your day to work on the hard and important stuff.

Michael Fiedler and Steve Speicher will be talking about OSLC and Eclipse Lyo at the upcoming Agile ALM Connect conference.    To introduce people to the Agile ALM Connect speakers and topics, I will be doing a short Q&A with some of the speakers.    Below Michael and Steve provide some background on OSLC and Eclipse Lyo.

1. What is OSLC and why does the industry need OSLC?

OSLC (Open Services for Lifecycle Integration) is an open community dedicated to reducing barriers for lifecycle tool integration.   The community authors scenarios and specifications for exposing application lifecycle data (change requests, test cases, requirements, etc) through uniform interfaces which rely on the architecture of the World Wide Web and Linked Data standards.

Organizations use a variety of lifecycle tools – commercial, open source and those developed in house – which need to share data, resources and assets.  Current integration approaches are often based on fragile and proprietary point-to-point APIs.   Tools adopting OSLC can interoperate easily using a linked data approach which enables loosely-coupled integrations with improved quality, navigation and traceability of shared data.

2. How would you like people or companies to contribute to the Eclipse Lyo project?

Individuals and companies are welcome to participate in both the Eclipse Lyo project and in the OSLC workgroups.   The Lyo project is looking for developers interested in promoting OSLC adoption by developing SDKs, reference implementations, compliance tests and examples.   OSLC workgroups develop integration scenarios and specifications to address different aspects of the system and software lifecycle (requirements, development, test, etc).   Workgroup participation is open and is a great way to learn more about OSLC and contribute to new and evolving specifications.

3. What is the best resource to start using OSLC and Eclipse Lyo?

Getting started with Eclipse Lyo and OSLC is easy.  To get started with Lyo, visit the Wiki on eclipse.org (http://wiki.eclipse.org/Lyo) to get an overview of the project.  To participate in Lyo development, you can start by introducing yourself on the development mailing list, lyo-dev@eclipse.org.  To participate in OSLC, visit http://open-services.net/participate and  join in the discussions on the forums, mailing lists and workgroup meetings.

“Using a weighted scoring system, points were awarded based on commit activity (commits per day), size of the project team and the number of in-bound links to the project. Black Duck determined the top 10 projects following an audit of its findings and normalization of scores.”

This is certainly great news for the Orion team and a great way to start their second year.  Congrats!

The Agile ALM Connect program committee has done an amazing job of bringing together a program that features some of the leading experts in the industry.   I don’t know of any other conference that brings together experts of tools, agile methodology experts and real world case studies.

The entire line-up of speakers is pretty awesome but here is a sample of the speakers coming to Agile ALM Connect:

• Jean-Michel Lemieux, VP of Development at Atlassian talks about how Atlassian does continuous deployment.
• Jason Huggins, CTO of Saucelabs and creator of Selenium, a popular open source testing framework,  will present how to use Selenium to test mobile applications.
• Luke Kaines, CEO of Puppetlabs and founder of Puppet,  an open source configuration management tool, will talk about Puppet and DevOps in general.
• Raziel Tabib, Product Line Manager for HP ALM solutions will talk about using agile in large scale teams.
• Dave West, VP and Research Director at Forrester, one of the leading industry analysts in the ALM space and a participant on the Agile ALM Connect program committee, will describe his vision of Lean ALM.
• Tom Grant, another highly respected Forrester analyst in the ALM space will talk the best practices relating to requirements management for agile teams.
• Israel Gat from Cutter Consortium is one of the leading thinkers on large scale agile transformations and will be presenting a blueprint for rolling out Agile in an organization.
• Jason Van Zyl, CTO of Sonatype and Founder of Maven, is going to do a technical presentation on using Eclipse and Maven together.
• Shawn Pearce is the project leader for Gerrit, an open source code review tool that is used by the Android development team and is closely aligned with Git.  Shawn is going to discuss how Gerrit can help harness peer code reviews.
• Adrian Cho and Scott Rich are two senior IBM development managers and technologist from the IBM Jazz team and have also been involved with the initial Eclipse Platform team.   They will be sharing their experiences of building Agile teams based on the principles of open development and transparency.
• Sam Guckenheimer is the Microsoft Visual Studio Product Owner will talk about the continuous feedback techniques the Visual Studio team uses to build their product.  As an aside, I am thrilled to have Sam talking at Agile ALM Connect.   The challenges of Agile ALM is a multi-language/platform challenge that definitely includes Microsoft Visual Studio.
• Cindi Mitchel is the Managing Director of ThoughtWorks Studios.   ThoughtWorks is a leader in Continuous Delivery, so we are lucky to have Cindi talk about how IT leadership needs to adapt for Continuous Delivery.
• Olivier Gaudin is the CEO of SonarSource the company behind the Sonar open source project, a quality management platform.   Olivier is going to talk about integrating Continuous Inspection into your ALM tool chain.
• Steve Harris is the Senior VP of Products for CloudBees, a PaaS for Java in the Cloud. Steve is going to talk about the success factors of hosting your continuous integration in the cloud.
• Scott Ambler, is the IBM Chief Methodologist for IT and a well known book author on Agile development.  Scott is going to talk about applying developer analytics to ALM.
• Finally, Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop, creator of Eclipse Mylyn and the program chair of Agile ALM Connect will be doing one of the keynote session on the Future of ALM.

This is a partial list of an amazing line-up of speakers and sessions.   If you want to know the future of Agile ALM, these people are setting that future today.   Agile ALM Connect is a great opportunity to understand how your IT department can get ready and benefit from Agile ALM.

Domain Specific Languages (DSL) is a term you hear more and more about as people try to simply a programming environment to a specific purpose.   Languages like Scala, Groovy and Eclipse Xtext are making it easier to create DSLs.   However, with any technology or term it is always useful to see real examples, more than just Hello World.

At EclipseCon 2012 we will have a DSL track that features real world DSL examples from companies like BMT Car IT, Google, Sanvik Coromant and Sigasi:

 Program, thou shalt behave! will feature how BMW Car IT has created a new tool, called Jnario, that lets you describe the behavior of software in a business-readable, domain-specific language.

Xtext success story at Google review lessons learn while Google developed custom editors for Google’s protocol buffer descriptors.

In DESAGN – A DSL for engineer-to-order,  Sandvik Coromant, who builds cutting tools for the manufacturing industry, will discuss their use of Xtext to create a demand driven expression language and a 3D modeling language.

Bringing the power of Eclipse to Digital Hardware designers will feature the story of Sigasi who have built an Eclipse based IDE for VHDL.

and finally

YAKINDU SCT – Domain-Sepcific Statecharts features the modular workbench for embedded systems, supporting state charts and block diagrams.

There will also be sessions on particular DSL technology, including:

Light-weight IDE extensibility for custom DSLs in Groovy which will show how the Groovy-Eclipse plugin uses DSL descriptors for creating DSL.

Xtext – Best Practice will cover  tips required for anyone wanting to use Xtext.

Win Friends and Influence People…with DSLs presents the ’7 Habits of Successful DSL Projects’

Xcore: Ecore Meets Xtext is the latest technology Ed Merks is developing, so I guess it must be good.  :-)

and finally

Domain Specific Languages is an overview an introduction to the pros and cons of DSL implementation techniques.

There will also be a 3 hour tutorial for Java Developers who want to use Xtext to create their own DSL.

If you are interested in Domain Specific Languages then EclipseCon has the education you need.  I hope you will join us and discover what is possible.

Another gratifying trend is the ‘almost natural’ step for language communities to provide tooling support based 0n Eclipse.   One of the highlights at EclipseCon 2012 is the opportunity to learn and see the support being developed for many of these languages.    A quick summary of the language support you can see at EclipseCon 2012:

Dart is a new web programming language being developed at Google.   Some see Dart as a structured version of JavaScript or even a JavaScript replacement.   Dart in Action is a session led by Dan Rubel from Google who is working on a Dart Editor based on Eclipse

Lua might not be a new language but it certainly seems to be gaining momentum, especially in the embedded and M2M industry. Lua tooling on steroids will demonstrate the current status of the Eclipse Koneki project which aims to provide a first-class Lua IDE.

Ceylon is a new JVM based language, developed at RedHat, positioned as a language for writing large programs in a team environment.  Ceylon – the language and its tools should give a nice overview of the new language and the tools they have built based on Eclipse.

Xtend is another new JVM language being developed at Eclipse.   In the session Eclipse Xtend – A Language for Java Developers,  Sven Efftinge will be introducing Xtend to the EclipseCon attendees.

JavaScript is not a new language but the support being provided by Orion is new.  There is a session and tutorial on Orion that will educate anyone interested in the future of JavaScript and web tooling at Eclipse.

If you want to learn about new languages and their tools, then EclipseCon 2012 will have be a great place to be.

One of the first activities is to create a common roadmap for the IWG.   A draft has been prepared and we are organizing a face-to-face meeting on January 31 at the IBM Hursley Lab to finalize on the first version of the roadmap.

The industry working group is open to members of the Eclipse Foundation.   If you would like to participate or attend the face-to-face meeting feel free to introduce yourself on the mailing list or send me an e-mail.

1. No(less) jet lag.   We are now on the east coast of the US, so for people flying from Europe it means just 6 time zones not 9.  Those of us already on the east coast, no jet leg.  My sympathies for those flying from California.

2. Close to the international airport.  The conference hotel is 15 minutes shuttle ride from Washington Dulles airport.  It means you won’t need a car or a long taxi ride.  The Hyatt has a free shuttle from Dulles.

3. Make it a vacation too.  Reston is close to Washington DC so there is a lot of tourist activities to do before and after the conference.   It is also the Cherry Blossom Festival so we might get decent weather.

4. Bars and Restaurants in Walking Distance.    The Hyatt is part of the Reston Town Center that includes 50 retails shops and 30 restaurants.    Lots of things to do, places to eat and drink all within walking distance.

5. Apple store is .2 miles.  According to Google, the Apple store is .2 miles or 3 minute walk from the Hyatt.  Enough said.

Looking forward to seeing everyone at EclipseCon in March.   If you are planning to go make sure you register before December 31, 2011 for the best price and don’t forget to book your room at the Hyatt.