Everyone at ActiveState is excited to introduce our newest offering Firefly – turn-key, hosted project management and collaboration for software development!  It  is packed with useful features and comes pre-configured so users don’t have to spend precious time configuring and maintaining their own system.

Firefly is based on the popular Trac project management system, an open source project that is highly extensible and has a great community of developers behind it. Trac offers the flexibility to add new capabilities to Firefly quickly and easily, providing best-of-breed functionality that our users expect and need. Built with small development teams in mind, Firefly is a hosted, centralized and secure environment where development teams can work on projects anytime, anywhere, and simultaneously without conflict.

Firefly standout features include:

• Pre-configuredand ready to use; easy permissions management and privacy for team members
• Integrated source code hosting, revision control, issue tracking, and version control with Subversion and Mercurial
• Project management tools to keep projects on track and budget for tracking time, workflow, project progress, milestones and team work activity
• Collaboration tools including wikis, blogs and forums to exchange ideas and give feedback easily
• Visibility into project status at a glance for managing milestones effectively

Learn more about Firefly features.

Firefly makes development teams’ lives easier, alleviates the pain of administrative tasks so users can focus on coding and deliver high quality projects on time.

Firefly also offers a lot of flexibility with four editions to suit the needs of development teams and independent developers: Team ($39/month), Professional ($19/month), Solo ($9/month), and Community (free).

Sign Up Today!

As the guy who does most of the Komodo screencasts around here, I’m always delighted to see one that’s been done by someone else. Creating a screencast takes a bit of time and it’s difficult to get them right, so when someone spends the effort to make one just because they like our product, it makes us very proud.

Here’s one by amberforge that shows off:

1. Komodo’s ‘Go to Definition’
2. Autocomplete features for PHP

Short and sweet:

There are more screencasts from ActiveState people on our Community site. I’ll be adding some more soon, but I’ve obviously got to go back to screencasting school and figure out how to do the panning, zooming, comments and titles that amberforge does.

Nice work amberforge. Thank you!

Never used Komodo? You can try Komodo IDE free for 21 days or use Komodo Edit for free!

Do you have Komodo IDE 4? Now’s your chance to upgrade: After October 31/09, upgrades from Komodo 4 -> 5 will never be less than $145 US:
Upgrade today for $95 US!

Just trying Komodo IDE out on a trial basis, or using Komodo Edit? You too can save $50 when you purchase a brand-new Komodo IDE 5.2. Regularly $295:
Buy a new Komodo IDE today for $245 US.

Part of a small development team and want to get everyone on board with Komodo? Download the guide to Komodo IDE in the Enterprise (PDF) (read: Get Your Boss to Buy tips!) and save even more this month. Regularly Komodo 5-packs are $1180 US (that’s like buying four and getting one free!)
Komodo IDE 5-packs on sale for only $995 US.

We hope you take advantage of these awesome savings!

As well, I just published a Drupal extension for Komodo ( well, the start of one ) on the ActiveState community site:

http://community.activestate.com/xpi/drupal-extension-komodo

Update: at Jared’s request, here is the color scheme I’m using.

Workspace projects used to have URLs that looked like this:
http://workspace.activestate.com/projects/sandbox

The SVN repository URLs of these projects looked like this:
http://workspace.activestate.com/svn/sandbox

Now, projects have “namespaced” URLs to allow different users to have projects with the same name (think “MyProject”, “test”, “Website” etc.). The new project URLs look like this:
http://workspace.activestate.com/troyt/sandbox/

… with associated SVN URLs of:
http://svn.workspace.activestate.com/troyt/sandbox/

We had intended that the URLs of projects created before this change would continue to work normally and interchangeably with the new project locations. In fact this did work until recent changes to how we load balance Workspace broke these redirects. We were faced with a conundrum: without the load balancer, we can’t scale Workspace effectively; with it, we can’t handle the old SVN URLs.

Unfortunately, this means users of projects created before Sept. 28th will have to switch to using the new URLs.
Fortunately, this isn’t that difficult. It should be as easy as running the ’svn switch’ command. For example, for a checkout of the Sandbox project shown above, you would ‘cd’ to the root directory of your local working copy and run:

$ svn switch –relocate http://workspace.activestate.com/svn/sandbox http://svn.workspace.activestate.com/troyt/sandbox

This will update the local working copy to mirror the new URL.Subsequent svn commands should work normally.

The checkout command shown on the project’s “Source->Checkout” page displays the correct, new URL.

We’d like to apologize to those users who have run into this problem, and reassure everyone that we will do everything we can to minimize disruptions

like this in future. We feel that the changes have helped make Workspace faster, more robust and more stable than it was when we started the Beta, nd we hope to continue this trend.

Keep up-to-date with all of the changes in Workspace Beta with our Workspace Beta blog.

ActivePerl has had ppm for years, and indeed it’s one of the big advantages of using ActivePerl over other Perl distributions. ActiveTcl got teacup a couple of years ago, which has allowed us to distribute a much “leaner” ActiveTcl 8.5, because users can easily install the extensions they need. Now ActivePython has its very own package manager: PyPM.

Python has had easy_install for a number of years, and more recently pip. These could be compared to Perl’s CPAN shell, but like the CPAN shell they need to build the packages that are downloaded from the Python Package Index (PyPI). If you don’t have a compiler installed and configured (i.e. most Windows systems), you can only build pure Python packages. Failing that, you can always search the web for a binary installer for your platform and Python version… somewhere… maybe…

ActivePython 2.6.3.7 contains the first beta release of PyPM and the repository already has thousands of packages for Python 2.6. You can install these packages using the same command on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

There’s a tutorial to get you started, and a list of packages currently available in the repository.

PyPM is following PEP 376 as it evolves to ensure you can using PyPM, pip and easy_install interchangeably without conflicts. We’ve also made sure it works with virtualenv.

We plan to add a GUI, keep adding packages from PyPI, and generally improve PyPM. So, give it a spin and be sure to let us know what you think!

I’m very excited about attending and speaking at the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit weekend after next in Seattle, particularly because I get to talk about using Komodo for Drupal development, something near and dear to my heart.

My talk isn’t just a plug for Komodo though, instead I’ll be delving into all the ways you can hack Komodo to make working with Drupal and other frameworks easier and more productive.

In an effort to understand our community better and to deliver news and info that is relevant to you, we will be conducting a few surveys over the next few newsletter issues. These are quick, multiple-choice questions that should take between 5 to 10 minutes to complete. We will be grateful for your insights! 5 lucky participants will be randomly selected to receive an ActiveState t-shirt and a certificate to use on any of our products. So take the survey today for your chance to win!

Thanks everyone! Your insights are invaluable.

Take survey here:

https://app.e2ma.net/app2/survey/24563/14396/84a2f99497/

We asked Shane Caraveo — Lead Developer and Product Manager, Developer Services — some questions about these recent developments, and posted the results on the new Workspace blog.

http://kevinbridges.org/node/182