Development Life-cycle Integration

Now that I can focus on more application development issues at work, it is time to start bringing up some of the open source life-cycle tools I need.  Integrating the individual tools (MediaWiki, Bugzilla, Subversion, Mailman, WordPress, etc..) requires some work.  This has proven to be a little different than my previous experience because we are an Active Directory shop.  MS Active Directory actually uses a form of LDAP for authentication but it is different enough that each of the tools I use requires a little… playing… to get it working.  Here are the important links:

The reality is that if you company is not doing re-time build tests, nightly builds, automated testing, bug tracking with integration into you source control management system, and automated reporting; then your company is waisting developers time and resources.  Open Source has only been as successful as it has because of the plethora of automated tools available to them.  Your competition is using them… you better be.  There are hundreds of freely available software engineering tools in the Open Source world.  Check out Tigris.org for a fairly complete list.

10 JavaScript Tips

Here is a lists of useful tips for novice JavaScript programmers. With AJAX becoming a way of life on the internet, the importance of solid software engineering practices has become more important. All too often neither JavaScript developers, nor “hard language” programmers think of JavaScript as real programming. Most people’s web experience would improve significantly if more people did.