DevBase went online yesterday for a few internal testers. It shows great promise as one of the main tools that we will be using for managing source code submissions around REBOL3, but also of the DevBase code itself and REBOL/Services. In fact the REBOL/Services code was not there in the beginning, but was uploaded in a couple of minutes, ready for the world to scrutinize.

The startup screen

Almost immediately, people could start working with it, even though it has still as of this writing a few bugs that need to be ironed out. Chatting in AltME, while studying code submissions is quite a satisfying collaborative experience in eliminating those bugs. You simply change the code yourself, rather than directing the author of the original code to a bugfix through chatting or with disjointed pieces of test code.

Submitted code to DevBase about DevBase changes. The buttons at the top right are for various purposes that are connected to this particular section of code.

With around 50 kB of source code (I said 40 last time. It grew a little.), it takes about 15 seconds to download and connect to the DevBase service at RT headquarters and download the source code overview, just straight from a fresh REBOL/View console.

Then, you can create a user or browse the source code as a guest. Anyone can browse the code as a guest.

If you are a regular user, you can just log in and hack away!

Here are a few more shots:

You can quickly see the source code that has been accepted by administrators for inclusion into the source tree.


DevBase allows you to use your favourite editor and Diff viewer.

Each category has summary pages to show what has happened recently in this category.


OK, let's study the HTTP protocol in REBOL3...

Let's upload some changes to it!

As always with REBOL, it works perfectly fine out of the box on Linux and MacOSX as well as both Windows XP and Vista. The screenshots are from MacOSX.

Some things are still missing, such as connecting to a bug tracker and displaying differences in source code files, but opposite of what we usually see, we can submit those changes ourself immediately as we think of them, instead of trying to get RT's attention through RAMBO. Over time, the DevBase code is expected to grow itself into a piece of sophisticated software.

All in all, this is a very impressive start! I truly look forward to working in depth with this tool and see what the community can do with it.