Integrated Assembly Environment - Choosing OForge to kickstart your project

My most recent client engagement was a site redesign and launch for a leading national news paper. There is definitely some sexy technology at work on that site now (Python, Django, Ellington, Apache Solr, Inform, ..), but today I'm choosing to 'blog about Optaros' Trac-based software distribution known as OForge.

For those who don't know, Trac is "an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects." It integrates seamlessly with Subversion, and I've personally seen it in action with teams ranging in size from one to one hundred developers and testers. Trac also won the UK Linux and Open Source 2006 Best Linux/OSS Developer Tool award.

My 18 months at Optaros have provided me with an opportunity to see OForge undergo significant growth. Having run my own Trac instance for personal projects since 2005, I watched OForge evolve from a slightly tweaked Trac install to a carefully selected and well-integrated set of plugins, extensions, and documentation that truly enable our delivery organization. OForge was officially announced on the Trac-users mailing list last week, and we're all pretty excited about that.

Recently, when transitioning the news paper's new website to their team, we opted to deploy for them an instance of our OForge Gentoo-powered VMware appliance. With the entire installation and migration process taking just a couple hours, we were all thoroughly pleased. People were committing again that afternoon. Pretty slick.

What I took away from that experience, and thinking back to past jobs and projects (both in my professional career and personal FLOSS endeavors), is just how valuable OForge will be to newly formed teams looking to kickstart their development process. Building out a project infrastructure often takes valuable time away from core members of a project team. The task usually comes at a time when these members also need to set direction for new developers, or perhaps (in the consulting world) engage the client.

The software stack OForge builds upon is pretty impressive, but it's also a rather long list if you were to setup something similar from scratch. In fact, it's over 30 packages including Apache, mod_wsgi, Postfix, Subversion, SQLite3, Trac, etc. All of these come installed and pre-configured with the OForge appliance. What you get is an integrated multi-project-capable development environment with Subversion, Trac, user account management, project email lists, and a slew of useful scripts and tools.

Hosting providers like SourceForge and Savannah provide a great service for community-driven open source projects. But for those looking to incorporate open source into their business model, or for those who simply require dedicated project hosting, I think OForge can fill that gap. It's an appliance in the truest sense of the word: plug it in and get back to developing software.