WANdisco Blog

That Was the Year that Was – uberSVN & All That…

Published by David Richards on December 20, 2011 in WANdisco and WANdisco. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , .

I suspect that I will always remember 2011 as the year when the curtain came down on one of the true greats – Steve Jobs. Great, not just in my world of Silicon Valley techies, but great for just about everyone else on the planet. Even though most of us never knew him we feel like we must have. We seem to use his stuff just about every day.

Apple’s success has had and will continue to have a massive impact on the design of computer systems and products. When we were thinking about uberSVN the very first thought we had was about the relationship between the product and the user. Ten years ago I don’t think that would have been the case. I guess you could call it ‘the pre-iPod days’ (the first iPod was released in October 2001 and was cast as “1,000 songs in your pocket”) before that, according to Jobs, music players were either “big and clunky or small and useless”.

Our customers told us that ‘old fashioned’ ALM was big-and-clunky; and they’re probably right! In many cases they were moving away from these ‘dinosaurs’ to a best-of-breed approach. Like Subversion for source control, JIRA, Redmine or Trac for defects & wiki, Review Board for peer code reviews, and so on.

When we launched uberSVN in April I talked about empowering users by giving them choice. Freedom to choose any combination of ALM tools that best fit the business requirements be it price or functionality, open source or closed source. How’s it doing? In short – amazingly well! To our delight it’s being used everywhere from Fortune 100 companies to the US Senate. I even got my 11 and 12 year-old children to install it on their MAC books – it took them only 5 minutes! Not sure how much use they get out of Subversion – but they did get double pocket money for their efforts! That really is the point of uberSVN. We have made an extremely powerful but complex product extremely easy to use and install by anyone and I think we succeeded in that regard.

We quickly followed-up with uberApps. Another ‘first of a kind’ product with an enterprise AppStore for software development tools. Now, with just a single click, it is possible to install a build & test product like Jenkins or even buy external QA resources from crowd-sourcing vendor uTest. This is another step in making ALM both usable and useful. Anyone, and I mean anyone can deploy these apps without special knowledge, experience or skills.

These products were developed in my hometown, Sheffield. It was our Christmas party there the other week and it really was astonishing to see how quickly we have grown. From a small office where we would “see what happens” we have grown to almost 40. There was a lot of laughing behind hands from my ‘friends’ from the south and lot’s of “ooop north” jibes. Well, in between wearing flat caps and racing whippets, the Sheffield team delivered an award-winning piece of software. uberSVN won 2 awards in the first year of its launch and we have seen almost 50,000 downloads.

Apache Subversion also continues to grow. Subversion is still the ‘King’ of source code management. More traditional Enterprises are turning away from old-fashioned / big-and-clunky ALM for Subversion. And SVN 1.7 (also released this year) has delivered a much-needed performance boost. Throughout the year I have been embroiled in various spats with the Giterons (Git fundamentalists who believe in the inerrancy of Linus) but only this month I have spoken to 3 or 4 companies that tried Git but had to pull it out due to various-and-sundry issues. Much more on that early in the new year, when we might just have a solution for those looking to use Git as more of a client to a central SVN server of record…

There was also some politics earlier in the year when one of our competitors used some pretty underhanded tactics to besmirch our good name. Unfortunately for them it worked quite well in our favor. We are, and always have been a big supporter of the ASF (we are even the only Subversion contributor to also be a sponsor). In fact, at the time of writing, we are in the process of proposing a new project for the ASF incubator. Again, lot’s more on that in the new year.

We also took some steps earlier in the year to solidify the Subversion community by acquiring SVNforum.org. I think we have done a pretty good job of updating the site software, Subversion Liveeradicating spam and generally making the site a useful, free resource for every SVN user. As part of our efforts for the SVN community we also hosted the first Subversion user conferences. Audiences in San Francisco, Boston and London attended “Subversion Live”. We are hosting Subversion Live again later in the year with a extended program.

So 2011 was a great year here at WANdisco but 2012 should be even better. We have several major product launches planned including a new (free) open source defect tracker / wiki, uberSVN Team, uberSVN Enterprise and a solution to the Git/SVN conundrum. In the words of ‘Potato Claus’ (the lead character in my kids’ favorite book from a few years ago) may I take this opportunity to wish everyone Happy Christmas, Kwanzaa, Chanukah, Winter Solstice, and also local and regional winter holidays and celebrations.

Here’s a rather nice pictorial representation of 2011 from a WANdisco perspective (click to enlarge):

Can’t live without Subversion – even for a minute?

Published by George Powell on August 17, 2011 in General, WANdisco and WANdisco. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

Can't Live without SVN - even for a minute?

Enterprise Subversion Webinar by WANdisco

The popularity of Apache Subversion (SVN) as a version control system has grown significantly in recent times and is widely recognized as the sole leader in Standalone Software Configuration Management (SCM). With more than five million users, an increasing share of the market and hundreds of major global companies deploying Subversion for their development needs it’s clear that many can’t live without Subversion – even for a minute!

Subversion maintains current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation, making it a highly compatible successor to various traditional SCM solutions. Subversion is open source (and therefore free), which suggests some of the reasons for its popularity but it also performs and scales in some of the most aggressive SCM environments on the planet where some of the traditional SCM products could not.

WANdisco supports the Subversion open source project in a number of tangible ways and one of those is through providing free training webinars. It’s important that users of SVN are maximising their skill set for their own benefit – and that of course strengthens the Subversion community in the process.

The suite of Subversion training courses provided by WANdisco caters for developers and administrators from many different sectors but our latest addition to the free webinar schedule is aimed at major firms that demand the very best from their SVN implementation.

Following the success of our Enterprise Hardened Subversion webinar, ‘Can’t live without Subversion – even for a minute’ will provide excellent content for users who demand that Subversion is always on and always accessible.

A featured case study from one of WANdisco’s valued Subversion customers will help participants learn why companies have become dependent on Subversion for mission critical applications and why they can’t afford to be down, even for a single minute!

The case study will highlight a very typical Subversion deployment: a technology company with around 100 developers started using Subversion as an ad hoc project implementation and it grew to become the company standard.  However, what they thought was a secure automated backup system actually failed and brought the entire system down, resulting in lost productivity of 100 idle developers for an entire day and project delays for an entire week lost before full functionality was restored.  That’s a lot of minutes – and dollars!!!  Could this happen to you?!

WANdisco’s Subversion Clustering provides an excellent solution and the webinar will explain how a three node cluster results in no single point of failure and extremely high availability. We will also tell you how implementation services were used to accelerate adoption with costs easily justified – the outlay being a fraction of the cost of real downtime.

If that wasn’t enough we will take you through a more detailed account of WANdisco’s Subversion Clustering, including replication, intelligent load balancing, flexible deployment options, extension with Multisite and implementation services.

If you can’t live without Subversion then make sure you register for this free webinar – and don’t waste a minute.

Click here to register for this webinar now.

Q&A With BCW Magazine

Published by David Richards on June 14, 2011 in General, Subversion, uberSVN, WANdisco and WANdisco. 25 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , .

Here’s an interview I gave with Business Computing World (http://www.businesscomputingworld.co.uk/qa-david-richard-wandisco/)

Can you position SCM and SCCM technologies as you see them in relation to ALM in the wider sense?

WANdisco’s heritage is in distributed computing—our technology enables active-active replication over a wide area network. The first application we implemented this with was Apache Subversion to create Subversion MultiSite (a distributed, highly available and scalable Subversion implementation).

Over the past couple of years we have become a very active participant on the Apache Subversion open source project and we are keen to ensure that Apache Subversion maintains its position as what we consider to be the world’s leading SCM tool.

Recently we announced uberSVN an open ALM platform for Subversion. The uberSVN platform is a very easy to use, easy to implement and easy to extend inside a distribution of Subversion. We see SCM as a core component of ALM—it’s where the source code files are stored. So transforming Subversion into a platform that enables you to choose best-of-breed ALM components is a very natural and evolutionary step for us. We don’t believe that any single vendor can provide a complete, best-of-breed ALM solution.

Why would a firm choose Subversion over traditional SCM solutions such as Perforce, Serena or even products from HP?

I guess a better question would be “Why do firms choose or replace traditional SCM solutions with Subversion?” I guess this is because Subversion is open source and hence free, but it performs and scales in some of the most aggressive SCM environments on the planet where some of the traditional SCM products could not. Subversion now has over five millions implementations—how many do the traditional SCM’s have? Not even a fraction of that and that means Subversion must perform and scale in a huge amount of environments.

It sounds like WANdisco’s core technology could be applied across multiple applications. Are you looking at other areas?

Indeed our replication technology is generic and can be applied to other areas. Relational databases is one area we are investigating in our labs right now. Maybe next year we will be in a position to announce something more concrete around database replication/shared-nothing database clustering.

Is WANdisco actively supporting the development of Subversion?

WANdisco is a huge supporter of the Apache Subversion open source project in a number of tangible ways. We have dedicated committers on staff that we pay to only develop Subversion, we are a sponsor of the Apache software foundation and we produce Subversion binary downloads and make them freely available on our website. There was some controversy last year but that was ‘rabble-rousing’ by one of our competitors. The end result is that Subversion development on the open source project is very active again. There is a lot of energy on the project right now and that is good for the wider community.

Are there any clear trends in the SCM space?

Subversion is continuing to gain adoption in the enterprise and government organisations. That’s probably not entirely surprising given that, in product lifecycle parlance, Subversion is in maturity. As I said earlier it continues to replace traditional SCM solutions. I would also say that Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server (TFS) is also gaining traction and is probably in the number two position. We don’t see enterprises moving their source code to the cloud yet. That may change but we have see some of the tooling move there—just not the source code.

What’s the uptake been like for uberSVN?

I’d say things are looking healthy, we have thousands of installs in just over a month and the feedback has been very good. I have never seen so many product installs and that is a good sign that the product is very easy to install. We worked very hard to get a product that could be installed in less than five minutes and we will never trade that off for anything.

Are there any big announcements scheduled for uberSVN?

In July we are planning a major new product feature that will enable customers to very easily install third party applications. It’s a really cool feature that will change the way ALM software is delivered behind the firewall. We also have some partner announcements around software build and quality tools.

Is GIT a threat to Subversion?

Funny, I was talking about this only today with an industry analyst and he has the same conclusion that we have. Git has its uses but probably not in the enterprise. OK please listen, I know that statement will upset a bunch of senior developers who think that GIT solves everything but it really doesn’t.

If you think about it GIT actually promotes anti-social software development; development in small, disconnected silos is not how software is developed in the real world. Most software is developed by teams whose members have a variety of skills who need to see what each other is doing and that’s the fundamental reason why GIT is not a threat to Subversion in the enterprise. It’s fine for the development of the Linux kernel but that model doesn’t work for most companies.

Subversion 1.6.17 Now Available

Published by Jim Campigli on June 1, 2011 in General, New Product, Subversion and WANdisco. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , .

Subversion 1.6.17 was just released today.   This newest version provides several key enhancements as well as bug fixes.   Most notably, 1.6.17 includes major improvements in checkout performance for large working copies on Windows, greater efficiency of ‘blame – g’  for users dealing with a large amount of mergeinfo, and improved error handling on Windows.   A detailed list of the changes included in this new release is available at:  http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/tags/1.6.17/CHANGES.   Release notes for the entire 1.6.x series can be found at:  http://subversion.apache.org/docs/release-notes/1.6.html.

To upgrade to this latest release of Subversion and take advantage of the fixes and enhancements that it offers go to: http://www.wandisco.com/subversion/download

uberSVN Updated

Published by George Powell on May 31, 2011 in General, uberSVN and WANdisco. 4 Comments Tags: , , , .


uberSVN evolves! In this first update we’ve fixed some bugs, offer more flexibility with authentication/authorization and added LDAP integration. Check out the details:

What’s New

  • uberSVN can now be integrated with an external LDAP/Active Directory service allowing the management of Subversion users to be centralized.
  • Added the option of using externally managed htpasswd and authz files, giving you more control over authentication and authorization.(ESVNB-1703)
  • Improved Apache error pages have been added. (ESVNB-1696)
  • Improved support for adding existing repositories to uberSVN
  • Numerous enhancements to look and feel

What’s Fixed

Included are more then 30 bug fixes, the most significant are listed below:

  • There’s now improved support for Multibyte (Cyrillic) characters.  Слалкий!
  • The message text that alerts you to the need for an uberSVN restart is now clickable, more easily triggering the required restart. (ESVNB-1442)
  • Improved the warning message that appears during a reinstallation of uberSVN. It now confirms that it is safe to continue installation if you are sure that the previous installation of uberSVN has been uninstalled. (ESVNB-1664)
  • Fixed a problem that stopped the SSL port from being updated once uberSVN was set to run using SSL. (ESVNB-1767)

uberSVN Documentation: http://docs.ubersvn.com/
Download uberSVN: http://www.ubersvn.com/download
Need professional Subversion support? http://www.ubersvn.com/support
Enterprise Subversion:  http://www.wandisco.com/subversion/multisite

The Next Frontier of Software Development: Social Coding for Subversion

Published by Jim Campigli on April 30, 2011 in General, New Product, Subversion, SVN Hackers, uberSVN and WANdisco. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

WANdisco recently unveiled uberSVN - a major new product available free of charge that transforms Subversion into an open, extensible platform for application lifecycle management (ALM). In addition to plug-and-play flexibility and rich system and user administration capabilities, uberSVN provides the first-ever social coding environment for Subversion, taking enterprise software development beyond the limits of email, wikis, defect trackers, peer-code-review-tools and other applications typically used to manage projects.

uberSVN’s social coding environment reflects the convergence of social networking paradigms represented by Facebook and Twitter that foster instant communication and the collaborative development models of open source communities where software with features similar to these social networking sites was first used. And it’s having the same positive impact on software quality and developer productivity behind corporate firewalls that it’s had in the open source communities that deliver such market-dominating software as the Apache web server, Linux operating system and even Subversion itself.

uberSVN is organized around development teams and their activities. Each team has a home page that profiles the team members, lists the projects they’re working on, repositories they’re using and their latest activity and status. Team members can see each other’s real-time progress by simply subscribing to Twitter-like feeds that managers can also monitor.

With uberSVN, just like developers in an open source community, software engineers in corporate IT environments can rapidly exchange information and continually learn from one another. Peer review and continuous feedback are the norm. The overall skill level of the development team goes up and the all-too-common pitfall of reinventing the wheel is avoided. The end result is higher quality software delivered in far less time.

uberSVN is free.  Download it now at http://www.ubersvn.com/download.

Our Initial Thoughts

Published by rbudas on March 4, 2011 in Subversion and WANdisco. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Where did February go?  As a resident of Massachusetts, parts of me (namely my back, shoulders and arms) are quite happy to see those weeks get crossed off the calendar.  Since my last posting here, I’ve not only been shoveling snow though.   Two separate Subversion Live events were held,first in San Jose and then two weeks later in London.

Both days were extremely fruitful for those of us from WANdisco that attended and I hope our attendees felt the same way.   The presentations in the various tracks were well attended, very professional and well received. A great source of information exchange was the roundtable sessions at the conclusion of each day. But what I always find most useful at events like this are the less formal conversations that occur prior to a session, or during a break, or over lunch.  Not surprisingly, inquiries about what our committers were looking to do with regard to enhancing Subversion merge support was the most frequent topic raised and the subsequent discussions and feedback we received was extremely valuable.

So with that information in hand, here’s what is being initially targeted:

  • Better handling of renames across merges
  • partially automated merges
  • Faster merges – improving performance of merge operations
  • Enhancements to importing to handle 3rd Party / Vendor source code

This is really just an initial list. The team is actually still quite busy at the moment working on the final aspects of Subversion 1.7.  But we are also still in active discussions about other use cases that have been raised and additional ideas may still be formulated and as those become more concrete, I’ll be quite happy to write about them here.

By the way, if you are still interested in attending Subversion Live, February’s weather pattern here in the Northeastern U.S. has accommodated you! Our Boston event scheduled for early February has been rescheduled for Tuesday, March 22. The same great agenda awaits but thankfully, the snow may not. I hope to see many of you in Boston and I’d welcome the chance to listen and learn from your experience.

- Rob

P.S.  I really did have to shovel a lot, including my roof!

We’re First Again with Certified Binaries for the Latest Release of Apache Subversion

Published by Jim Campigli on March 3, 2011 in Subversion and WANdisco. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

How and Why Do We Do it Every Time?

The Subversion community just announced the release of Subversion 1.6.16. Moments later, WANdisco announced the availability of its fully tested, certified Subversion binaries for this new release. Before we make these pure, certified binaries available for free download under the Apache 2.0 license, we put them through the same QA processes we use for our enterprise products that support Subversion deployments with tens of thousands of users processing millions of transactions each day. And because we verify that these binaries are pure, unmodified open source before we make them available, there’s no risk of being blindsided by IP infringement claims when you use them, or getting forced down the path of implementing proprietary solutions for defect tracking and other applications with Subversion.

The reason we’re able to accomplish this so quickly with every release is that WANdisco is committed to Subversion’s success and we’ve backed that commitment with our own very talented resources. First and foremost, these resources include core Subversion developers who have become our employees. These individuals have been a part of the project since the beginning and they have the status within the community to make changes to Subversion’s code base. They’re actively involved with the rest of the Subversion community from the time a new release is in the planning stages until it’s publicly available. And they’re led by Hyrum Wright, WANdisco’s Director of Open Source and the release manager for the Subversion project since 2008.

In fact the bug (CVE-2011-0715) was reported by Philip Martin, one of our very talented, full-time Subversion developers.

There’s no denying that WANdisco has an interest in Subversion’s continued success, particularly with large enterprises that have adopted it so enthusiastically over the last few years. But at the same time that this rapid adoption has validated Subversion’s success, it’s placed demands on the project to meet the kind of tough requirements that these large enterprises have. In addition, they have clear requirements for enterprise class support that’s on a par with the support services available for closed source solutions, as well as professional training and consulting services.

At WANdisco we’ve hired senior Subversion committers, offered enterprise class Subversion support, provided free training webinars , as well as paid for training classes, hosted our Subversion Live user conferences where attendees meet with committers in person, and become corporate sponsors of the Apache Software Foundation. We’ve also taken the lead on fixing branching and merging, a requirement that’s been out there since 2007 waiting to be addressed. We’ve done all of these things not because they are easy and make good press, but because they are required for Subversion to continue on its very successful path. That’s something we all have a stake in.

How to Choose an Open Source (Subversion) Support Provider.

Published by David Richards on March 2, 2011 in General, Subversion and WANdisco. 1 Comment Tags: , , .

Open source support can be a lucrative business for software vendors.  It’s kind of necessary for large organizations that cannot implement any software without support.  But not all support is the same.  Some companies offer support that they have difficulty really fulfilling.  I have tried to come up with a checklist to help you decide which vendor you should choose.

1. Do they have full committers on the project?

In his book “Producing Open Source Software”, Karl Fogel discusses the critical role of committers on an open source project: “The project cannot rely on people’s own judgment; it must impose standards and grant commit access only to those who meet them.”  Take the inverse; suppose your support provider does not have committers.  Do they really understand the code?  Can they recognize a bug?  Can they even propose a code change to the community?

2. Do they have global scale?

Let’s say you have developers in N. America, Europe, India and China.  You will more than likely need 24×7 global, follow-the-sun support.  Easier said than done.  Some people solve this with low-cost support centers. But how much do they know about your open source product and do you know that your confidential data is safe?

3. What support systems do they have?

Can you dial a number and get someone on the line in your time-zone?  Can you have multiple internal people see and manage support tickets? Is there a knowledge base?   I even heard one story where a Subversion support organization wanted to use Skype to transfer a customers confidential Subversion files for analysis – now that’s a big red flag!

4. Do they care? Are they passionate about this stuff?

It goes without saying; but to provide great service then you really have to care.  Part of the goal of open source support is to provide direct feedback to make the open source product better.  Support providers that care are more than just an insurance policy they are doing it because they care about the future of the open source product they are supporting.

5. Don’t buy just an insurance policy.

Open source support providers love selling insurance only.  Why?  It’s easy.  You’re paying for something that you might use once in a blue moon and the margins on that are huge.  Really ask yourself if the provider could fix a corrupted repository or provide impartial advice on tuning your Subversion implementation for maximum performance?

6. Don’t be fooled into using their modified version of the OSS.

One of the big reasons to use open source software is to avoid vendor lock-in.  You should be careful to read what it says on the tin.  Subversion, for example, is licensed under the Apache License, which pretty much allows free use of the software for any purpose (distribute, modify, etc).  Other, modified versions of Subversion may be licensed under more stringent license terms as either a proprietary license or even GPLv3 which Steve Ballmer referred to as “”a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches”.

7. Does their business model conflict?

Why is the provider offering open source support?  To make money?  To create demand for other products or services?  Because the market needs them to?  Whatever the reason it should be a good one.  I hope it’s not just to make money J

8. Check out references?

In our space, Subversion Support, there are so many horror stories.  Support tickets unanswered for months (and even years),  inadequate support systems,  lack of knowledgeable staff,  using partners to fulfill contracts who have not received adequate training, lack of integration with open source committers.  Just like any enterprise purchase check out a couple of references.

9. Ask a few questions upfront, test them!

Some of our support customers have done this and I think it’s pretty clever.  They say, “Well if you’re better than company X then you should be able to answer this, because they couldn’t”.  And they provide a list of say 3,4 or 5 questions.  Maybe they could even be items that your current provider failed to answer adequately.  However you do it.  I would do it upfront.

10: Pick WANdisco for Subversion support :)

Look finding ten very different things is tough OK :) and let’s face it I am biased. But the advice above is good. Before we had full time core developers on the Subversion project we could not offer Subversion support. If you just paid $100K for a new Ferrari would you get it serviced by a one-man-and-his-dog outfit operating out of their home? Would you trust a company that only used the cheapest of the cheapest resources thousands of miles away with inadequate systems and untrained staff? Would you trust a company that couldn’t answer a few softball questions you threw at them?

We are now a sponsor of Apache!

Published by David Richards on February 1, 2011 in Subversion and WANdisco. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Apache Subversion WANdiscoI am pleased to announce that today we have become an Apache Software Foundation (ASF) sponsor.

I firmly believe that actions speak louder than words. This clearly demonstrates our commitment to open source and also our belief that the ASF is the right place for Subversion.  Any claims that we are at odds with the ASF should now be put to rest.

The ASF is a non-profit, volunteer-run foundation and this will help aid organizational, legal and financial support for a broad range of Apache licensed projects including Subversion. Other Apache Software Foundation sponsors include Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook, we are proud to join them. We are extremely grateful to the ASF.  This is a ‘safe home’ – Apache have led the way in community open source development since 1999 and they are no stranger to mature, pervasive open source technology like Subversion.

This announcement coincides with the inaugural Subversion Live Conferences.  Apache Subversion has certainly come a long way since its inception in 2000. With over 5 million users it is recognized as the leader in Standalone Software Configuration Management. Indeed, a recent Eclipse Foundation survey found that over 58% of Eclipse users use Subversion, making it the dominant source code management product by a huge margin.

Subversion is no longer a young upstart and we believe it has become critical to talk to Subversion users.  We must uncover the needs of enterprises both large and small.  Subversion may be mature but that does not mean that innovation stops.  The last 11 years (has it really been that long?) have been amazing.  To become the dominant technology in this space is the software equivalent of scaling Mount Everest.

Together, as a community we can do a lot more. May Subversion continue to lead the way for another 11 years and beyond!