The company is also rounding out the release with access to the usual spate of Web 2.0-style resources, such as online forums, blogs, and of course, publicly accessible web sites that run CollabNet Community Edition.
The highlight of the release is obviously the CUBiT functionality. CUBiT is CollabNet’s feature that enables developers to provision testbeds on the fly. CUBiT is part of anew breed of tools that seek to automate what is otherwise a labor-intensive task of building and then tearing down testbeds. It’s a task that consumes time, and on its own, conveys little if any value.
Testbed automation is a relatively new portion of the software development market that has drawn the likes of VMware, which acquired Akimbi last year, and Surgient, the more established name in the field, which has an alliance tie-in with Mercury.
It enables developers or QA specialists to capture, version control, and manage images of testbeds. So, each time you want to test a build, you retrieve an image and remotely provision a testbed machine or virtual container, rather than having to reinvent the wheel.
CollabNet of course has been best known as the provider of the popular open source Subversion source code control tools. It has been gradually building a broader base of commercial offerings covering more of the application development lifecycle with higher-end tools that handle developer administration/role management, multi-project management, and of course, CUBiT test bed virtualization. And just over six months ago, it acquired the rival SourceForge source code collaboration tool, which is supposed to be merged in with CollabNet Enterprise sometime next year.
What’s more interesting from CollabNet is what’s coming around the corner. Next month, CollabNet is releasing version 1.5 of its flagship, Subversion, which will add tracking or merged source code branches. Today you can merge them, but there’s no facility yet to document the audit trail for the code that is being merged.
And early in the new year, you’ll see a version of the CollabNet desktop also coming out in Visual Studio, initially with basic support of the version tracking as an alternative to Microsoft’s source code control. In effect, it will provide a bridge for Java developers who are targeting other platforms.
Significantly, what CollabNet is planning with Visual Studio neatly coincides a new licensing scheme for Visual Studio partners, who can now target the Visual Studio shell for languages outside the .NET platform.
