I'm interested in the container OSS project - but probably more as a user than a contributor. I doubt I could offer much in the way of code.

I've mentionned my interest in the history reports before. I will contact you this month to see if there's anything I can do. Will work now to free some time in that respect.

I've been integrating Maven with a great tool called Hackystat.

Tool home page with screenshots:
http://csdl.ics.hawaii.edu/Tools/Hackystat/

Developer's site:
http://hackydev.ics.hawaii.edu/

Public server:
http://hackystat.ics.hawaii.edu/

The basic purpose of Hackystat is to automatically collect development metrics (test coverage percent over time, size of code over time, etc). It also can (optionally) collect other data, such as how much time was spent in the IDE for a project.

The basic usage requires no installation. The data is sent via Ant tasks using SOAP to the University of Hawaii public Hackystat server. Typically, projects register several users, and one daily build user. The daily build user is often registered as the dev-list email for the project. Each night when the daily build runs, it sends the metrics to the metrics server. An email is then sent to the user (in this case, the dev list), that links them to the most recent project analysis.

Privacy statement here - http://hackystat.ics.hawaii.edu/hackystat/controller?Page=help&Subpage=warranty.

Data can be analyzed over many types of ranges, including by day, week, and month. This makes it easy to ignore small ripples in, say, test coverage while allowing you to see that the overall trend in test coverage is declining, so you can act to correct it.

An alternative installation would allow Hackystat's WAR files (one SOAP listener and one JSP/servlet type website) to be placed in a Tomcat container (4.1.x is officially supported, but 5.x would likely be OK, to my knowledge). In that scenario many users can work on many projects, and have the data used in the right summaries.

The Hackystat group is very open to feedback, and great to work with. I've been creating Maven plugins to send daily build and coverage data to the metrics server, and would be happy to help make more efforts in that area. I'd really enjoy working with Jerome as well. He's given me some good help on work I've submitted to other OSS projects.

I think Hackystat and Maven could complement each other well. All reports and graphs are available using simple HTTP GET calls (even if the site uses POST). A Maven report could make it easy to pull reports from Hackystat and place them on a publicly available website for everyone to see. In depth analysis of the data is then available to project members.

If you think it's worth looking at, please let me know and I'd be happy to answer any questions I can, and put you in contact with the developers if you'd like as well.

--Tim

Tim, Vincent, there's been an interesting post on maven-user, about the history report tool.
Someone mentionned xradar.sf.net.

Seems nice (and maven built). Wait to hear from you on the maven or xradar lists.

Hi Tim,

Thanks for this detailed description of Hackystat. Actually I was aware of it and I had looked at it some months back. I definitely think it's a good idea and it has some similarities with the "Personal Project Information Portal" idea that I have (gathers project information on a dashboard mostly using RSS feeds and itself provides different RSS feeds - kind of an aggregator of projet information: CVS, JIRA, Wiki, metrics, etc).

I see that you are interested in getting history functionality for Maven. Just wanted to make you aware of a project called XRadar which have been used in a large company for improving the quality of their internal software. I know also that they are working on getting XRadar more integrated with Maven.

Hello Vincent,

I was also really interested by the potential of the dashboard plugin : visibility to management.
I'have worked on extension of your dashboard plugin to manage the history of these metrics and generate graphs.

a sample report is available here :
http://users.skynet.be/fb050808/docs/dashisto-report.html

currently it's not really "releasable"... no docs, not a lot of tests... but it gives an idea of what it could be.

the implementation is quite simple but not full java. To generate the graphs i'm using the gnuplot tool (http://www.gnuplot.info)
the plugin merge the last generated dashboard data in his history (stored in the local repository) add some infos (build number and build date).
Then 2 style sheet generate the data,the gnuplot script and the xdoc report.

Do you think i could think of releasing it ? or just keeping it as an exercise ;)

Do you have any suggestions ?

Stéphan

Hi vincent,

i've updated the site to give access to the plugin and regenerated a non trivial report.

http://users.skynet.be/fb050808/

i'll contact you by mail, when it will be really tested on my employer's projects (i hope monday but not sure... other priorities for the moment).

Sorry for the moment, my first goal is to make it usable at work then i will check with the maven community how to make it better (or throwing it away and doing it better).

Stéphan

Hi,

I am interested in the OSS container project. Please let me know the URL (If it is incubated). I have promised myself to commit time for this.