Success is...

So often in life, defining success is difficult.  Is it 10 times ROI?  Is it a shiny new bank account after an acquisition or IPO?  (No, ActiveState is not at that stage, I'm just dreaming of my own Central American island.)  Well, those are nice when they happen, but not as personally fulfilling as seeing users excited enough about the software you write that they make the effort to tell others, or contribute something to it.  We've always had some level of that happening around Komodo, but in the last year it has really begun to take off.  There are more and more people making those contributions, and that is awesome.  Here's a blog entry where the user has gone to the extent to do a lengthy screencast introducing the features of Komodo Edit, and one of our contributors just released a side-by-side diff extension.   I find I like thinking of success as having lots of interested and engaged users.

Another day, another baby dragon born

I'm always happy to announce the birth of a new version of Komodo!  4.4 Alpha 1 is up on our download servers.  You can find out the details on our community site and see my announcement in the forums.  There are some really nice enhancements for IDE, and we're focusing now on lots of smaller enhancements and fixes for both Edit and IDE.

Open Komodo at LinuxFest

This morning I gave a talk on Open Komodo at LinuxFest in Bellingham, WA.  I'll be around LinuxFest all day, either at our table or in room Haskel-219 where Ericn Promislow is giving a couple talks also.  If you're visting LinuxFest, drop by and say hello! My slides are attached below.

Download linuxfest2008.pdf

Komodo does it all: Google App Engine

So many API's, so little time.  From early on, one of our major goals with Komodo was to make it easily extensible from a variety of methods.  We started with the toolbox, and added lots of little gadgets to allow our users as much flexibility as possible.  This includes macro's (in JavaScript or Python) with full access to our code, templates, run commands and more.  We eventually expanded into using the extension mechanism that is in Firefox and other Mozilla-based applications.  The premise was, and still is, we cannot be a "do all, be all" organization.  People want to do things we never thought of, don't have time to do, or that may take us some time to get around to.  That brings me to Google App Engine.  Over the past couple weeks, I've had several people tell me we should be doing something around App Engine support.  Komodo is ideally suited towards technology stacks like this.  Komodo is flexible enough that somebody else got around to doing it without us (see update below).  That's great!  Yes, we want to do more, but there is always more to do than we can get to, so we focus on giving you the power to get things done.

Update: it seems the original blog post is down, but I found another similar posting.

MozCamp and Vancouver PHP

We had an excellent three days this week, starting off with a gathering of local developers working on various mozilla-based applications that we called MozCamp.  MozCamp turned out to be a great time to get to know the 20+ people in the area (that we could get here) working on similar technology.  It's not often that I get that oportunity.  So we've tentatively decided to do a small MozCamp every couple months, rotating between Vancouver and Victoria.  Some of the topics we discussed are quite similar to the discussions on MozPad, such as build systems, patches, development tools, etc.  Hopefully the chance to have "local" meetings will create some energy around these idea's.

The Vancouver Open Web conference was an outstanding conference this year, one of the better conferences I've been to.  Zak's keynote was very cool, I hadn't seen it before (I guess I'm out of the loop in some ways).  It seems there are a series of good, inexpensive, interesting conferences these days, I hope they continue in the same fashion for years to come.  Maybe it's just my focus on smaller nitch conferences rather than large events.

Followup: I've created a google group to help coordinate locally in the northwest. 

Face-to-face with Komodo and Dracula

I've a couple speaking engagements lined up over the next couple months.  The first is at LinuxFest Northwest where I'll be talking about the Open Komodo project.  We had a table setup there last year, and a couple talks.  It's a great conference, inexpensive, if you're able to you should try to attend.  The second is eLiberatica where I'll be talking about, you guessed it, Open Komodo.  This talk will be a bit different though, as I will be focusing more on the business and experience side of open sourcing a commercial software package.  I also hope to get a chance to see Dracula's castle!

MozCamp at OpenWeb Vancouver

We've organized a small get together of XUL app developers in BC who are attending the OpenWeb Vancouver conference.  Here's the details for anyone who might be interested, hope to see you there!

MozCamp Vancouver, Sunday April 13, 12pm to 5pm

Location:
ActiveState
1700-409 Granville Street
Vancouver

I am glad to announce Mozcamp, an informal gathering of developers who work on XUL applications and extensions.  We'll start the day with a brief intro from each attendee, covering what they work on and what they are interested in discussing.  We can then self organize for the rest of the afternoon. Any topic is accepted, from development issues to strategy and beyond.

Vancouver and Victoria have a number of organizations that currently develop mozilla-based applications, such as Mozilla Messaging (Thunderbird), Flock, Songbird, Brand Thunder and ActiveState (Komodo
IDE).  Representatives from these organizations will be attending, and as well this event is also open to anyone who works on mozilla-based applications, extensions, or related technologies.  ActiveState is providing the space, Mozilla is providing the pizza.  Space is limited, so please RSVP to me ( Shane Caraveo: shanec@ActiveState.com) as soon as possible.

A new face for bugzilla at ActiveState

Ages ago ActiveState started using bugzilla, but there was on primary problem with it.  The usability and appearance was not what we considered to be polished.  Yes, I'm being polite.  At the time, we forked our own copy of bugzilla, had many patches to it to make it nice, add some features we wanted, etc.  The problem with that: we could never update to a more recent bugzilla without a high amount of effort. 

With the latest incarnations of bugzilla, it's feature set finally got to a place where updating became more efficient than trying to maintain a six year old forked version.  We pulled the plug on our forked bugzilla and moved onto the current code base.  Unfortunately, we lost our polish in the process.  That has now been addressed, and we've got a whole new face for bugzilla.  Our webops team, and Tara Gibbs specificly, has put in a lot of effort to put a pretty face and smoother functionality on a web property that is critical to our operation.

You can see the fruits of our efforts on bugs.activestate.com.  We've still got some work to do but this is a big improvement over the default install.

As each improvement to bugzilla itself appears, especially in the area of modularity and extensibility, we'll be able to keep up.  So I also have to give a big thanks to the bugzilla development team. 

Mysterious dragon on the loose

Not only did we get Komodo 4.3.0 released, not only did Edit get turned into a fully open source build from openkomodo.com, but we got recognized as a "Productivity Winner" for the Jolt Awards in the IDE category.  I almost feel like I'm on stage at a beauty pageant...good thing I'm not.  But you should check out Komodo, it's pretty sweet.

$300 for a Komodo extension

Turdhead.com is offering up a bounty for a Komodo (ok, alternatively jEdit) extension.  They're offering $300 to the best ActionScript extension for Open Komodo *or* jEdit.  I've offered an additional free license of Komodo IDE to the best Komodo extension, whether it's the final winner or not (see my comment on Turdhead).  Any takers?