Every Flavour Beans

After a long time, Google has come up with a (yet another ‘free’ and ‘beta’!) service that interests me very much. I have no use for an online spreadsheet or a photo album application, though Google Notebook was a useful addition. Now comes the impressive free project hosting service for the open source software projects, which adds to many other good free hosting services available, like Sourceforge.net, Tigris.org, Savannah.org etc. The main highlights of Google’s hosting service are: the ease of use/administration(no lengthy forms to be filled, no waiting for the approval etc), source control with customised version of Subversion software and project search functionality. On the face of it, it looks like a service seriously lacking in terms of features, but that is one of the main reasons that makes it stand out from the other project hosting services, in my opinion.

Many a times, all I had wanted was a source control repository(CVS or Subversion) to host my projects and easy management of which users have the write access to it. The free service provided by cvsdude.com looked to fit the bill well for me initially, but the 2MB limit on the free plan turned out to be very restrictive very soon. Their paid service is too costly for someone needing ‘just a place on the internet to store/share the project files.’ In this context, Google’s free Subversion service(with [expandable] 100MB storage limit) is like an ideal fit for my requirements.

Creating and administering a project is a total breeze with the Google’s new hosting service. Go to the home page of the service, click the ‘Create a new project’ link, fill out the most essential information about the project(project name, small description, long description, license) and you are done. You can start hosting your project right away, no approvals from Google are needed.

Do remember to note the project name and the url that is created for the project; you will need it to access the project in the future, as no link to the owned projects is present on the google account’s home page once you login into the hosting service. Once the project is created, you need a suitable Subversion client(as needed in almost all the other similar services) to upload the project to the subversion repository. A list of such desktop Subversion clients is available at Tigris website. Once the project files are uploaded to the Subversion repository, others can download them by checking a copy out using a subversion client(instructions available on the project web page) or browse the source code from with in the browser(the interface to view the source code from the browser is not as good as in Sourceforge(ViewCVS), but it gets the job done.

What is lacking in Google’s service, though, is a way to download the project files by the general users. Only the instructions on how to check out the project files anonymously from the Subversion repository are included and the project owners will have to host a tarred or zipped release version of their software at some other server and provide a link to it from the project page(custom links can be added from the administration page).

If you want to put any other information related to the project, say some documentation etc(apart from the basic description entered during the project creation), you need to put that elsewhere too(Google may suggest Google Base or Google Pages for this). A link from where to download the binaries/source of the latest release, a little bit of documentation should be good candidates to be added to such a project specific page. It will be highly desirable to have such a web page integrated with the hosting service itself.

The trend of categorising the resources using tags can be seen in all sort of applications these days, Drupal and MoveableType being two examples. Instead of categorising the hosted projects under only one category(or a few), the project owners can assign a few descriptive tags to their projects with the Google’s hosting service. This will be helpful in searching a project from all the hosted projects. Google calls these tags ‘Labels’ and there is not limit to the number of tags that can be applied to a project. A utility that allows cricket scores to be displayed on a mobile phone developed using J2ME, for example, can be tagged with ‘cricket’, ‘mobile’, ‘J2ME’ labels. I wonder how effective the project search functionality will be if some of the administrators chose to use every possible label that there is to describe the type of their projects.

Members can be added to the project by the project owner from the administration page. They need a google account to be a part of the project.

The only other major feature in Google’s project hosting service(apart from subversion repository) is Issue Tracking. Anyone can submit an issue to a project and the owner can configure what kind of issues are supported by the project.

While developers seeking a feature-rich project hosting platform might be unimpressed with the watered-down hosting service provided by Google and may continue to find comfort at places like sourceforge.net and tigris.org, for a large section of open source developers, the features like free source control repository and ease of adminstration should prove to be sufficient. It would be interesting to see what new features Google will come up with for their project hosting service(if they were to ask me, I would vote for service-wide search functionality for the source code) in the near future.