The logging libraries provided with Java 5 and above are pretty good, except they produce output that is almost unreadable. For example, consider the simplest example:

Logger logger = Logger.getLogger("PushServer");

logger.log(Level.SEVERE, "This is a sample message");

That produces the following log entry, on your screen and/or in a file:

Sep 28, 2009 9:30:48 PM javaloggersample.Main main
SEVERE: This is a sample message

Individually, that's OK, but 20 messages? Messy. 1000 messages? Pretty nasty. 100 threads each generating a stream of FINE messages? Yikes.

We have just publish the following updates to the Code Spaces application.

• Fixed Require SSL Support
  If you select “Applicaion Requires SSL” or “Login Requires SSL” in the Code Spaces admin section this will be reflected by the App.

• SVN Over SSL Option
  You have always been able to use svn over SSL, however you now have the option in the Code Spaces admin section to force SSL.

• Activity Timeline
  You will notice a new tab names “Activity Timeline”, this is a simple top down view of your project activity.

• Time Tracking
  We have moved the time tracking attributes to a tab inside the Work Item editor and added estimates and actual attributes (We will be creating Burn Rate and velocity graphs for the next release).

• Language Support
  We have added support for multiple languages (although we currently only have English) and will be adding more languages this week, including German, French and Spanish. Please let us know if you require any other languages.

That’s about all for now ;-)

As always let us know if you have any issues and/or comments…

Cheers,

Floyd Price
Code Spaces

No More Free Plan!

On the 1st of August 2009 we will be removing the FREE Code Spaces plan and replacing it with a Mini Plan that will cost $2.99 per month.

All existing FREE plan customers will be given 2 months further for FREE and will then need to either switch or move to another FREE host.

Why are we doing this?

Many of the features we are adding (and have added recently) are aimed at higher end customers who by definition do not fit on the FREE plan.

We also feel that our service is somewhat more than simple SVN hosting and as such we feel that it adds little value to our user community to continue serving Free svn users.

What about my Open Source or Non-profit project?

We are proud to support over 100 non profit (and Open Source) projects and will continue to do so, this announcement will not change our position on this.

Give us your feedback?

As always, we are happy to listen to feedback and would love to hear your thoughts, Contact us Here.

Hi all. This is a quick service update – we’re experiencing network connectivity issues between Subversion and MySQL right now. This is affecting Subversion’s ability to authenticate usernames and passwords and, as a result, you might be getting ‘500: internal server error’ when you try and checkout, update and commit.

We’re working to resolve this ASAP. I’ll post any updates as and when I can. Our current expectation is that this will be fixed within 30 minutes.

Thank you for your patience.

Adrian

Update (17.00 GMT): These issues are now resolved and the service is stable again.

Further to Adrian’s recent announcement about v2.6 I would also like to add that the SVN Backups tab is now available via the Admin tab, which gives you direct access to your SVN backups.

Please let us know if you have any feedback for any of these enhancements?

Cheers,

Floyd Price
Code Spaces

You may have noticed that we released an update to the CodeSpaces application last week. CodeSpaces is now at version 2.6, and these are the features and changes that make up the new version:

• Planning We’ve added classic project management features including a Gantt chart to CodeSpaces. Work Items now have a start and end date/time field, and this is relfected in the Gantt view. The Gantt chart is a Flash component that has been developed in-house. We’re going to open source it in the very near future, but we’ve got more enhancements planned for 2.7 (zooming, weekend auto-breaking and so on).

• Work Item numbering This is the change with the greatest impact, but we hope you’ll agree that it is worth-while. We’ve renumbered work items—before this update they used the identity field in the database, so ids were system wide and non-sequential. Now they’re scoped by project, so new work items will always have a predictable id. We know some of you were using the old work item numbers in source code/external links, so we’d like to reassure you that all of the old numbers still work, they are just not published any longer.

• Account/Project rename You can now rename your account without needing a support ticket. It might take a few minutes depending on what other automated tasks are concurrently running

• Dashboard and cardwall shortcuts to create new Work Items

• Basic Help Panel You’ll notice a little text panel in the right-hand bar that changes as you move around the application. We’re going to expand this and add a full-blown help system soon.

• Source Code Tab Now shows folders in the main section, for improved navigation/detail.

• Commit Emails Contain summary of changes (similar to svn log etc.)

• Project Admins You can now make a user a project admin, allowing them a certain level of control over project settings without making them a full-blown account admin.

• Minor changes Work items now include a drop-down that contains a list of icons that you can choose for the item. This icon will be shown in the Work Items list and on the Card Wall.

Your feedback is welcomed, but please report any bugs though the usual support channels so it can be handled quickly and effectively.

Thanks, Adrian

We are pleased to announce the availability of Code Spaces v2.5, this is the first in a series of updates that will bring us to v3.0 over the coming months.

This update includes many foundational enhancements, performance updates and extra scaling options, including:

• Infrastructure Update
  All the Code Spaces SVN, App and database servers are now running on Amazon EC2 and as such we have updated all components to take advantage of the almost limitless scaling opportunities.

• Changes to Plans
  With our new found abundance of space and processing power we have updated the Code Spaces Plans, in a nut shell all plans now have unlimited projects and repositories and the FREE plan now has 500MB of disk space (10x what it was).

• Card Walls
  A new tab has been introduced to Code Spaces between the Dashboard and Work Items called “Card Wall”. A Card wall is a visualization of Work items, and allows work items to be displayed as cards in virtual swim lanes that represent categories such as Work Item Status, or Assigned To. Within the context of a milestone Card Walls give Agile teams the ability to plan, estimate, do Stand Ups, etc all from the Code Spaces UI. The Card Wall section also allows for convenient dragging and dropping between swim lanes, so re-allocating or prioritizing work items couldn’t be easier.

• Browser Rendering Issues
  All known IE6, 7 and 8 rendering issues have been resolved. Firefox 3+ exhibited rendering issues on the Code Spaces Dashboard where the timeline would bleed through any components above like menus or dialogs. This has been resolved.

• Email Notifications
  Users can now receive email notifications from activity in the Code Spaces forums. Admins can now specify user notification preferences in the User Admin section.

• Return URLs
  Previously the Code Spaces application would redirect to the login page when an login was required which is great, however the context of the request was lost and the user would not be returned back to the page they requested after a successful login, this has now been resolved.

• Backup Changes
  We now use the snapshot feature of Amazons Elastic Block storage to take block level backups every 10 minutes, we are also taking actual backups of each repository as a commit occurs meaning we have a much greater capacity to respond to failure.

A few other not so noteworthy bugs have been fixed and many performance improvements have been applied.

As i mentioned this is one of many updates that we will be applying over the coming months, v2.6 is scheduled to go live in exactly one month from now ;-)

As always please Contact Us if you have any suggestions ;-)

Many Thanks,

Floyd Price
Code Spaces

UPDATE – This work has now been completed.

Code Spaces will be unavailible for a few hours on Sunday (8th of March 2009) from 10:00 GMT to 14:00 GMT

During this time the WWW site and SVN Cluster will be unavailible.

Many Thanks,

Floyd Price
Code Spaces

We are doing some Beta testing and need a few willing volunteers to help us out.

If you are interested please Contact Us.

Sorry for being a little secretive at this point, more details to follow ;-)

One of our wonderful users (you know who you are) has offered to help us translate Code Spaces into Spanish.

Please let us know if you would like a translation in to any other language, and even better if you are willing to help ;-)

Many Thanks.

Floyd Price
Code Spaces