[Dart] Announcing CDash!

[Bill Hoffman]

Bill Lorensen wrote:
> 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.
> 
>>From the server side, there is currently a choice of 3 servers. I
> expect that CDash will eventually match Dart2's requirements and have
> many extra features.
> 
> I will say that I am impressed with the dashboards produced by CDash
> and the speed at which Julien is addressing bugs and feature requests.
> CDash currently has perfomance and documentation issues, but I'm sure
> Kitware will address these.
> 

These are all good points.  The main reason we did not work with the 
Dart2 code base, was the single java process.  It did not scale well for 
us.  For example, we were never able to get VTK, CMake, and ITK working 
on a Dart2 server for more than a week or two at a time.

Currently CDash is running all of the public dashboards at Kitware (VTK, 
ITK, CMake, ParaView, KWWidgets, BatchMake, and we even added vxl).  It 
is running all of these dashboards with a very low memory foot print on 
the server, both run time memory requirements and disk foot print.  I 
estimate there is about 1 years worth of combined testing data in the 
public CDash database, and it is about 8 gigs of disk space.  This is 
much better than Dart1 which used 50 gigs or more for the same.  CDash 
can not really crash like Dart2 did as it is not a process that keeps 
running.  Rather CDash is a modern web application using a standard web 
LAMP (Linux Apache, MySql, PHP) stack. I have it running on my windows 
box with XAMP.

If you find performance issues with CDash please report them to the 
CDash bug tracker.  It is still considered beta, and does not have 
proper documentation, but we are working on these issues.  As Bill 
mentioned, the client side has not changed.  You can try Dart1, Dart2 or 
CDash.  As far as I can tell, CDash will be the only one with active 
development.

-Bill