wtorek, 14 lutego 2012

Open sourcing Surveys project

In late 2010 and first half of 2011 me and a few other friends (Rafał Jamróz, Jacek Bryła and Małgorzata Popiołek) have created a small Java+Flex application for creating, filling and evaluating surveys. It was intended to be used at the local university but AFAIK was never really put into use. That's not a big deal, really, because it was an awesome opportunity to learn, away from everyday job's problems and deadlines.
We have spent a lot of time doing refactoring (my main focus was on Java tests), testing new ideas. We even got a major re-write of the user interface when it turned out that our initial concept was not really usable by the target users (on backend the changes were major but not that hard to fit into existing design).


Quite a lot of time has passed since we have finished working on it (in fact - abandoned it). From the very beginning we intended to open-source it but were not sure whether our contract will allow us to do it. In the end we were able to keep all the rights to the code (in exchange for 2 years of support period - but we don't spend a lot of time supporting the released version ;) and now the big day has come - Surveys and it's helper projects (ActionScript code generator and some commons) go available on the web - hosted on github.

Initially we did host it on a private SVN repository on Xp-dev.com . We've done all of our development using the old, good SVN but decided to migrate it to git before public release. I used a short tutorial on how to migrate a repo along with its history to git and it worked great (we've lost some of the history while still on SVN, while splitting projects, renaming svn repos etc.).

To end this short self-advertisement I would like to say thanks to my collaborators - you were great! I really liked our "stand-up" breakfasts at work and our "iteration" reviews. I had a great time working with you on that project.

P.S.Head revision might not be stable (I hope it still builds correctly!). To build Flex you might need some dependencies that are not (or maybe were not at that time) available in public Maven repos.