One problem that startup companies often have is demonstrating to investors that they’re actually doing something productive rather than just pouring away money on office plants, Herman Miller chairs, and playing foosball all day. … One thing you can do is show the evolution of your code over a period of time using a tool like StatSVN.

Lines of code are certainly not the most meaningful numbers, but they are a nice and simple way of demonstrating activity. Sometimes that’s all you need.

The most interesting aspect: To gather information about a project, Ohloh also connects to its CVS repository and displays statistical and historical information about the project’s development, and even generates information on individual contributors. Thus, it’s a public website that provides a hosted service somewhat similar to tools like StatCVS.

A good example is the Ohloh page for StatCVS itself. Here’s the page about me as a contributor to StatCVS – Ohloh determines that I have 1.2 years of Java experience and four months of CSS experience. Neat, it uses SIMILE Timeline.

The developers also have a blog.

So, what can Ohloh do for people involved with open source? I think the clearest story is this: People who want to quickly evaluate a project can use Ohloh to get a one-stop overview. For example, we learn from the StatCVS page that the project has “5 active developers”, “increasing development activity”, an “established codebase”, and a project cost of $139K (huh?).

In the future Ohloh could add some more sources of data (project mailing lists, issue trackers), and could become a one-stop dashboard for people involved with the project, to stay on top of day-to-day developments. A bit like a hosted version of Trac.

I see this as one more unexpected advantage of the open source development process: Since the source code and other data is available on the Internet, third parties can built services that add value to the development process.

The main new feature is a cleaner look for the reports (example). The commit log has been redesigned and now features permalinks for all commits (example). There are also a couple of new reports and tables, such as the “Developer of the Month” table and a highly useful overview of all repository tags. See the release notes for a more complete list of changes.

I’ve also done quite a bit of refactoring. The main target was the HTML generation code. It had grown for four years without much design attention, and was quite a mess. After the recent changes, adding new reports should be much easier and fun again.

A big thank you goes to everyone who has contributed code to this release: Benoit Xhenseval, Brian Jørgensen, Eric Meaney, and Anja Jentzsch.

• Bugzilla integration (will turn “Bug 1234” in commit messages into klickable links)
• ViewVC integration
• XDoc output for integration in Maven-generated project sites

All work on this version has been done by Benoit Xhenseval and Jason Kealey of StatSVN. Thanks, guys!

We considered Subversion support, but Subversion doesn’t include the all-important lines of code numbers in its logfiles. Tammo and Steffen even put together a patch for Subversion, but couldn’t get it accepted by the Subversion team.

StatSVN works around the problem by connecting to the Subversion server and fetching all revisions of all files to count the lines of code. This isn’t exactly an elegant solution, and it’s slow, but it works.

There’s a nice whitepaper on StatSVN. Here’s a sample report, which looks pretty much identical to those generated by StatCVS.

The most significant new feature is that CVS tags are now shown in all timelines. For example, in the StatCVS report for the project itself you can marvel at the amount of inactivity between the previous release and today’s. More important, the release includes all the bugfixes and small improvements that have accumulated over the last two years.

I was trying to figure out how to automate, in some fashion, the creation of release notes. My project is using CVS so I could get a dump of commit messages using cvs log. But the CVS log output is extremely verbose and certainly not suitable for management or other non-technical parties.

Enter StatCVS:

Among other things, the tool does a nice job of formatting the commit messages, excluding the files that had no changes and grouping commit messages intelligently.

StatCVS also provides statistics based on user. You can see how many commits each developer has made, when those commits were made, as well as files and the number of lines of code affected. While this might seem a bit Orwellian, it really is useful information for a team lead.

cvs co .

Running StatCVS on that will produce a nice report for all modules.

If you want some, but not all modules from the repository, and are on Unix, then you can create a “virtual” module that contains only symbolic links:

/cvs
   CVSROOT/
   module1/
   module2/
   module3/
   combined_modules/
       module1 -> ../module1/
       module2 -> ../module2/
       module3 -> ../module3/     

Then run a report on combined_modules.

(Thanks to Brian Peterson for the tip.)

“If we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as lines produced but as lines spent.”

—Edsger Dijkstra

Jena downloads are usually around 80 per day during the week, with slightly less on the weekends. After the 2.3 release on 12 Oct, they briefly rose to about 200 for a few days, then stabilized again at 110.

I’ve added some sparklines to the SourceForge project activity RSS feeds. I did this using James Byers’ sparkline PHP library, a phantastic little project which was a joy to use after I got it working.

This is what the daily stats look like now (Safari screenshot; the statistics are from the RSSOwl project):

I’m thinking about adding sparklines to StatCVS too. Ideas are welcome.