What's New in Review Board

We thought it was long past time to show off some of the excellent work our UCOSP Fall 2013 students have been doing, and introduce you all to our Open Academy Spring 2014 students.

UCOSP Fall 2013

In Fall of 2013, we had a batch of great students from across Canada: Elaine, Natasha, Edward, Behzad, and Alissa. We met up at Mozilla in Toronto and got everyone set up. From there, they flew through the semester, adding some great improvements to Review Board.

• Elaine wrote an extension for effectively using checklists for code review.

• Natasha put together an experimental project for auto-suggesting reviewers on new review requests based on the files that were modified, in order to target those people who may know the code best. We're hoping to optimize this (some database changes may be needed on our end) and get it into a future release.

• Edward rewrote our search support for 2.0 to use Haystack, which is a lot easier to set up than PyLucene.

  He also improved RBTools by adding rbt setup-repo, adding the --commit option to rbt patch, and adding the --update option to rbt post. These are all part of the latest RBTools releases.

• Behzad did a bunch of work to get our new trophy system in place. We still have some work to do to integrate it, which we're hoping to do after 2.0, but the end result will allow for new types of trophies, a trophy case to see which trophies you've collected, and extension support.

• Alissa added a new page in the Administration UI for doing a security screening of the site. It can help highlight known configuration issues on the server that need to be addressed to keep things secure. This is going into 2.0.

We put a little demo video together with our Winter team showing off all their work. Check it out!

It was a fantastic team, and we're very thankful for all the great work they've done!

Open Academy Spring 2014

We participated in Open Academy this year for the second time, and were once again privileged to have another fantastic group of students, spanning schools across the globe. This semester, we have Anselina, Bhushan, Edwin, Iines, Joonas, Mirai, Olessia, Stephanie, Tami, and Tomi working with us.

We met up at Facebook HQ in February for a fun and intense weekend of hacking. There, we got to know each other, ate some donuts, figured out projects for the semester, went bowling, and got to hacking.

(Here are some more photos of the event, taken by Tami herself!)

They're all well into their projects at this point. There's a lot of great stuff coming:

• Anselina and Bhushan are working to add official support for pre-commit and post-commit hooks for Git, Mercurial, Subversion, GitHub, and other services.

  These will be able to close out review requests when the commits are pushed, and enforce approval before pushing changes.

• Edwin is making the contextual diff fragments in reviews a bit nicer by allowing you to expand them to get a better idea of where the comments were made without having to jump into the diff viewer.

• Iines is working on making it easier to link to specific lines in the diff viewer.

• Joonas and Mirai are performing some usability research and development on improving our mobile experience.

• Olessia is expanding our support for hosting services. She's adding Review Board 2.0's post-commit support for more hosting services, and providing a lot of the base work needed to revamp the repository configuration experience.

• Stephanie is making the widgets in the Administration UI reorderable, and allowing admins to add and remove widgets. She'll also be adding extension support for custom admin widgets!

• Tami is improving the user page to be more flexible. It will be updated to let you see all the reviews made by that user.

• Tomi is adding deeper support for bug trackers. With this work, it'll be possible to update bug reports when the status of review requests change, and to show information on a bug when mousing over a bug number.

They've been making great progress so far! They also all have work going into Review Board 2.0 or RBTools 0.6. Not a bad start!

Here's a few of our students to tell you about their experience at the sprint at Facebook:

Here's to another exciting semester!

Updated 30-October-2013, 12:05PM PST: Fixed the minimum Review Board version required. You'll need 1.7.14 or higher.

We're pleased to announce a release candidate for the Review Board Power Pack. While previous beta releases have been limited to people who signed up for our beta program, his release candidate is public, and anyone who is using Review Board is welcome to try it out.

The Review Board Power Pack is a set of advanced features to help you get even more out of your peer review system. If you'd like to check out what's included, see the Power Pack page.

Installing and activating the Power Pack

If you're running a previous beta of the Power Pack, you should have received an email with detailed instructions on how to upgrade. If you're a new user, use the following instructions.

To get started, make sure you have Review Board 1.7.14 or newer installed. Then install the Review Board Power Pack by running:

Once that's installed, reload your web server, then browse to your administration interface and click "Extensions." You should see a single extension. Click "Enable" to activate it.

Once the extension is activated, you need to install a license. We've created a trial license which will keep things going until January 1, 2014. You can download this license at http://downloads.beanbaginc.com/powerpack/powerpack-trial.lic

Once you have the license file, click "Configure" on the extension. You should see a field where you can upload the license file to your Review Board server. Once you do this and save, you should see a trial license installed, and the Power Pack features will be enabled.

Using the Power Pack

Any PDF files that are attached to a review request (with "Upload File") will then have a "Review" button which will take you to a document viewer. To add comments, simple drag across a region of a page like you would with an image attachment.

To add GitHub enterprise repositories, go to the "Add Repository" section in the admin interface. You should now see a new hosting service called "GitHub Enterprise". Configuration works just like GitHub.com, but you'll put your GitHub Enterprise server name in the form.

Setting up multiple front-end servers is a complex task, and we're working on some documentation about it. In the meantime, if you're planning on using the Power Pack for this, get in touch and we'll help you out.

We'd like to hear your feedback, good and bad. If there are any features that would be important to your organization, please let us know that too.

For any questions or comments, you can reach us at any time at support@beanbaginc.com.

We're up in Toronto today for the final day of the UCOSP Winter 2013 Sprint. Through UCOSP, we get to meet and work with bright and enthusiastic students pursuing careers in the software industry for a whole semester. Our students work on Review Board, building cool projects and getting a feel for what it's like in the industry. It's pretty awesome.

This semester, we have five new students: Allisa, Behzad, Edward, Elaine, and Natasha.

Allisa got into development at age 13 when she started writing custom maps for Neverwinter Nights. Now she's making it easy to do a security check of your Review Board installation to make sure you're safe from known configuration-related vulnerabilities.

Behzad got his start writing and modifying scripts for mIRC when he was 11. For this term, he's making our hidden trophy support less hidden by giving you a nice trophy case on your user page, showing every trophy you've earned. It'll even support the development of new types of trophies, even under extensions. (One may make the association between fish slaps and fish trophies?)

Edward's background was in systems engineering, until he found .NET and fell in love with programming. That led him toward going back for a CS degree. He's now taking a role on RBTools, adding some nice improvements. This includes extending 'rb patch' to be able to commit under the contributor's name (useful for open source projects) and adding a command to guide the setup of a new source tree.

Elaine used to want to be a writer, but found she liked writing code more than stories. She's working on an extension to help out when using checklists for code review.

Natasha got into CS after her first programming class in high school, because it fed her love of puzzles and problem solving. It also goes well with her coffee addiction. Her project's goal is to automatically suggest reviewers based on who has reviewed similar code in the past.

We were also joined by a former student yesterday, Yazan, who fixed a bug for us, and just generally hung around helping out.

UCOSP is a fantastic program, and we look forward to it every semester. We're super lucky to get such great students, and I'm really excited to see how far this new team will take the project.

Special thanks to Steven MacLeod and Mike Conley, our wonderful co-mentors who help make this happen every semester; UCOSP, who provide the opportunity for us to participate and meet such great students; and Mozilla, who provided the space for the sprint.

Until now, we've been running two separate beta programs for PDF Review and "Review Board Enterprise". We've decided to merge these together into a single product that we're calling the "Review Board Power Pack."

The major features of the combined package are:

• Review PDF documents that are attached to review requests, commenting directly on the text, all in the browser with no extra plug-ins.
• GitHub Enterprise support.
• The ability to add capacity to your Review Board server by adding additional front-end servers.

Changes in the new preview

In addition to merging together the features of our two previous beta packages, there are some improvements and bug fixes for PDF Review in this release:

• The outline mode in the sidebar now shows the tree structure of the table of contents.
• When a document has a table of contents, the sidebar now allows switching between either the outline mode or the pages mode.
• Scrolling behavior when using the mouse wheel or touch-pad gestures has improved significantly, making it easier to get all the way to the bottom of the document.
• Non-PDF documents like .docx are no longer detected as PDF.
• When attaching a PDF file with drag-and-drop, you can now click on the thumbnail to jump to the review UI to preview the document.
• Several issues with PDF rendering have been fixed.
• A fair amount of visual design polish.

Getting the Power Pack

If you already signed up for the beta, you should have an email explaining how to install it (or upgrade from the first beta). If you haven’t signed up, but would like to participate, please fill out our sign-up form and we’ll be in touch.

Once we have a final release, these features will be available on RBCommons.com for our larger tiers.

We've been working toward a set of enhancements to Review Board for larger installations that we're currently calling Review Board Enterprise. The functionality we're targeting initially includes:

• Support for repositories on GitHub Enterprise.
• Ability to scale across multiple servers, to handle larger numbers of consecutive users.
• Faster diff viewer rendering. Diffs will begin generating immediately upon upload, outside the Apache process, and this can be scaled out as well.
• Pre-built Review Board VMs for quick installation and scale-out.

Depending on interest, future versions may include:

• Enhanced diff features. Due to the new way we can process diffs, we can start enhancing what the users see, speeding up their review process, and thus saving companies time and money.
• Multiple SSH keys. Associate different SSH keys to different repositories.
• Single sign-on. Integrate with existing SAML-based services.

These are changes we've been using on our hosting service, RBCommons, and are working to make available to a larger audience.

We're collecting sign-ups from anyone interested in giving this a try. We'll send out an announcement with a beta download once it's ready.

If you're interested, you can sign up here.

This will be a for-pay addition to Review Board, and will help directly fund the continued development of Review Board itself.

We're proud to announce that we've released an initial version of the PDF Review extension. This extension allows viewing PDF attachments directly in your browser, and you can add comments on the content.

If you're curious about how this works, we have an overview of the functionality over on our blog. If you'd like to get access to the beta, please fill out the signup form and we'll be in touch.

Review Board has been a fantastic tool for software developers for many years now, but over time, we've seen people try to use it for reviewing things beyond code. We've therefore been working to make Review Board useful to a wider audience beyond just developers.

Lately, we've been working toward the first part of this, a Review Board extension to enable peer review of PDF documents. We'll be holding a private beta of this extension pretty soon, and are opening up a sign-up form for those who are interested in giving it a try and giving us feedback.

In order to help fund the Review Board project, we plan to make this a paid extension (but free for open source or educational use). In exchange for your comments and feedback, participants in this beta will be offered a discount off the list price once we hit 1.0.

If you'd like to participate, please fill out the signup form and we'll be in touch.

For over a year now, we've provided professional Review Board hosting for businesses at RBCommons. It's been a very good year and change, and we're celebrating by offering an End of the Year sale.

For a limited time, new signups and upgrades on the Small, Medium or Large plans will receive 50% off the price for 3 months.

If you're looking to get started with Review Board and don't feel like hosting it yourself, give us a try. There's never been a better time!

Yesterday, we released Review Board 1.6.11, which required the new Django 1.3.2 security release. Unfortunately, as some users have noticed, Django 1.3.2 breaks Python 2.4 compatibility. We have filed a bug against Django, but in the meantime, if you're using Python 2.4, you may need to downgrade back to Django 1.3.1.

To downgrade, first locate the Django-1.3.2*.egg directory in your Python path. Delete that, and then install 1.3.1 by doing:

$ sudo easy_install Django==1.3.1

We are hoping this will be addressed soon, at which point we'll update our 1.6.11 package with a hotfix that requires the new version.

As previously mentioned, GitHub is transitioning to a new API and will be soon deprecating the version that Review Board speaks. We've been hard at work on this move (which brings with it a better repository configuration experience and the groundwork for tighter integration with GitHub and other services).

In the meantime, new users have been unable to link with private GitHub repositories, since GitHub no longer supplies the required API Token anywhere on the account page.

But good news! There is a workaround. If you have curl installed (common on Linux), you can request your API token by doing the following:

    $ curl -u github_username https://api.github.com/legacy/token

Enter your password when prompted. The result should show you your API token, which you can paste right into your repository configuration page.

We'll be sending out a release soon that will make it easier to get your API token when configuring the repository, followed by a new release with the GitHub API v3 additions in the following week or two. We want to make sure it's rock-solid first.

If you have any questions, we're always available on our mailing list.