[Dart] Announcing CDash!

[Bill Lorensen]

Matheiu,

First let me say I'm no longer a GE guy (although I am a GE pensioner).

Here is my take on what has happened:

GE was the originator of the original VTK quality system (pre-Dart)
and GE created Dart (classic) as part of GE's National Library of
Medicine ITK contract. A few years back, we split quality
responsibility with GE retaining server control (Dart) and Kitware
retaining client control (CTest). As part of the NIH NA-MIC effort, GE
created Dart2 which was database centric. Recall that Dart classic
produces static web pages on a periodic schedule.

Dart2 is a total java solution available from a single jar file. One
of its key requirements was ease of installation without system admin
intervention. It also supports an external database like mysql,
postgress or oracle. Early in Dart2's deployment it had some
performance and reliability issues, which I believe were fixed.
Currently it is used by Slicer3 and several external projects.

The main criticism of Dart2 is that it does not seem to be supported.

Kitware was a major contributor to the requirements for Dart2. Many of
their suggestions were incorporated into the system. However, some of
their needs were not met.

I'm sure Kitware can comment on this. Dart2 is open source. I'm not
sure why they didn't enhance and improve Dart2 to meet their needs.
Rather, they started over and produced CDash. Sometimes people would
rather start from scratch rather than work with someone else's code
base.

Now, from the client side, all is well. The xml schema for build/test
is supported by Dart classic, Dart2 and CDash.