[Dart] Announcing CDash!

[Blezek, Daniel J., Ph.D.]

Hi Matheiu,

First let me say that I'm no longer a GE guy (not yet a GE pensioner either!).

I believe the Kitware guys have good reasons for being unhappy with Dart2, however, I'm still not sure why they didn't work to address their issues in the codebase that we had worked on for so long, nor where the funding came from.  It was my understanding that GE was responsible for Dart/dashboard development under the NAMIC funding.  We(GE) were not consulted at all during the development of CDash.

I think Dart1 will reach end of life soon.  It is certainly not supported, nor recommended for use.

With my leaving GE and NAMIC funding, I don't think Dart2 will be maintained.  Which is really to bad, it's perfect for small projects that don't require the high volume that CDash claims to support.  If you are considering starting a new dashboard, one might consider using CDash once it matures a bit.

Eventually, CDash will supplant Dart2.  While at GE, Jim Miller, Bill Lorensen and I worked on a very similar project called Frost, a precursor to Dart.  Frost was build on PHP, MySQL/Postgres/Oracle, and Apache. The problem we ran into with Frost was deployment and administration.  It required building just the right version of PHP, setting up a RDBMS and administrative privileges on the machines.  This is why Dart2 was designed to be just a single Jar file, with 7 easy steps to set it up.  We'll have to see how CDash stacks up in ease of setup/maintenance.  I do see that Kitware is offering consulting and training around CDash.

Happy dashboarding, whatever system you choose,
-dan
 

-----Original Message-----
From: dart-bounces at public.kitware.com [mailto:dart-bounces at public.kitware.com] On Behalf Of Bill Lorensen
Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2008 7:16 PM
To: Mathieu Malaterre
Cc: Steve Pieper; dart at public.kitware.com; Bill Hoffman; Félix C. Morency
Subject: Re: [Dart] Announcing CDash!

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.