For anyone who uses NAnt in their build process, this release is great news for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that the project is active again, and very much so it would appear. If you are like me, you were probably a bit worried that the project would be (or had been) abandoned and you would have to learn a new build tool for your process. Well, as I wrote in an article in July of last year entitled “Is NAnt Dead?”, project activity was evident at that point as we could see updates being committed to source and responses to bug reports. So the hope we felt then has been vindicated and we can breathe a small sigh of relief as the project once again marches onward.

Based on the road map, the code being updated now by the NAnt project team is scheduled to be released as version .90 and is reported to include the updates that were to be added in the .87 version that was never finalized. According to the new NAnt Blog, the schedule for this release is very soon (within the next week or two), and the schedule for subsequent releases is much more aggressive than we’ve seen from this project in a long time. Going forward, .Net 4.0 Framework support is scheduled to be added in the release following this one (scheduled in release .91, Q2/Q3 2010), along with any bug fixes. And finally, a 1.0 version is scheduled for Q3 2010 for any remaining bug fixes (no new features), and final documentation updates. The schedule continues to look forward to releases 2.0 (Q3 2010) and 2.5 (TBD) which include additional .Net 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 support and additional enhancement requests.

Acknowledgement:

While we all like to see new features added and bugs fixed in our favorite software development tools, one must admit that the sheer activity of the project in recent months is cause enough for celebration. If you have the chance, be sure to contact the project team members or leave comments on the new NAnt Blog letting the team know that you appreciate their great work on this project. Or better yet, get involved with the project by testing and reporting bugs, and show your appreciation by supporting their efforts.

References:

• NAnt Project Home: http://nant.sourceforge.net/
• NAnt Blog: https://sourceforge.net/apps/wordpress/nant/
• NAnt Road Map: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/nant/index.php?title=Roadmap
• NAnt Release Notes: http://nant.sourceforge.net/release/latest/releasenotes.html

Now, the only problem was that cPanel on my shared hosting account can only have one login, and my associate (okay, my brother) is the owner of another site on my account, www.fealabs.com. I wanted to give him access to his statistics data on the account, and I don’t mind sharing my credentials with him, but I wanted to make it easier for him to get the data he wanted to see about his site. So I went searching for a package that can supplement AWStats with good statistical and analytical views, without the need to log into the cPanel account. After a short research session on Google, I came across JAWStats…

After reading about the features on the website, this little statistics package appeared to be just the thing I needed for the task. I downloaded it, uploaded it to my server, unpacked it into its own sub-domain folder, and had it configured and running in just a few minutes. The documentation the author provides on his website is easy to follow and setup is as easy as renaming the configuration template file and editing some variables in that file to customize your installation.

What does JAWStats offer?

The website doesn’t currently offer a definitive list of features, so I’ve compiled a short list below:

• Uses AWStats data – No need to reprocess logs, just point it at the AWStats data location in the configuration.
• Web 2.0 based interfaces.
• On-demand stats updates – An interface with AWStats interactive update feature allows your site administrator to update their stats on demand (AWStats must have this feature enabled for it to work).
• Multiple site support – It can be configured to use the data from one or more sites on your host with an easy way to switch between them. Also a multi-site overview add-on is available as a separate download.
• Multiple language support.
• Summary in header with last update date and time, visitor count, unique visitor count, and averages.
• Month view of visitors, page views, hits, and bandwidth statistics including bar graphs and calendar views.
• All Months view with monthly and yearly counts including a line graph.
• Hours view that shows popular site hours including a line graph.
• Browsers view with grouping of browser families or individual browser versions including a pie chart.
• Countries view all countries, grouped by continent, or individual continents, including pie chart. (AWStats must be configured to use a country database to utilize this feature)
• File types view including pie chart.
• Operating systems view grouped by families or individual OS versions including pie chart.
• Pages view with top page hits, top bandwidth pages, top entry, or top exit pages, including pie chart.
• Referrers view with search engines, top 10, top 50, all referrers, or domains, including pie chart.
• Spiders view showing all search engine spider traffic with pie chart.
• Searches view with keywords, key phrases, keywords tag cloud, and key phrase tag cloud, with pie chart.
• Session view with pie chart.
• Page status view with file not found (404) list and pie chart.

MAWStats – The Next Step

Now, the JAWStats project hasn’t seen a release since late January, 2009 (0.7 beta), but it’s very stable and useful in its current version. If you want more functionality (as I did), there is a (temporary) fork of the project called MAWStats which is being actively updated by another developer with the hopes of merging the code back into the JAWStats base at some point. MAWStats offers a few cool new features that aren’t included in the current release of JAWStats. Below is a list of some of these added features:

• Support for AWStats mail server statistics.
• Cities view with several groupings and pie chart. (City database must be installed and configured in AWStats for this feature to work.)
• Organizations view with pie chart. (Organizational database must be installed and configured in AWStats for this feature to work.)
• Visitors page with pie chart.
• Replaced Flash SWF graphics with Flot javascript graphics.
• Customizable visitor descriptions.

As I said, the developer is actively working on this project and has been participating in the community discussion boards on the JAWStats website. The current version of MAWStats is 0.72 which includes the features I listed above, and the developer has plans for more features in the upcoming 0.8 release. I’ve been using the latest version for the past few days and it has been very stable, and the developer has been very receptive to requests and bug reports on the community discussion boards.

Overall, both JAWStats and MAWStats offer a very nice statistics and analytics package.

More Info:

What is NAntBuilder? (Excerpt from NAntBuilder Website)

NAntBuilder is a full-featured Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for NAnt, the popular process-automating tool. It is designed to be a powerful NAnt script creator, editor, and debugger.

NAntBuilder enables you to manage your build process easily, allowing you to focus on more interesting and important works. Its full-featured code completion will save you thousands of keystrokes while authoring NAnt script. And the integrated NAnt script debugger will help you execute NAnt script task by task. With all these features, NAntBuilder provides a flexible, easy-to-use platform to author, debug and execute NAnt script.

The Review

While I was researching ways to help implement automated builds using NAnt, a colleague of mine ran across this tool and passed the information on to me for evaluation. We were still in the early stages of planning a new automated build process and there were some inherent risks with regard the learning curve for NAnt scripts to support the new process. For many developers who specialize in managed code (like .Net) with fully supported frameworks and object oriented design, using scripting technologies and being forced to think in a more procedural design can be difficult. Not to mention, scripting technologies often don’t have good tool support for design, coding, and debugging. So, while there were no specific initial requirements for a development tool for NAnt scripts in our project scope, NAntBuilder appeared to be a good addition to help mitigate certain project risks associated with the learning curve factors.

IDE Layout and Features

NAntBuilder provides and MDI interface to allow for editing multiple scripts with both a design view and a code view that allow the developer to attack each script visually or directly. The visual design interface offers the standard drag-and-drop features where you can drag script tasks from the tools pane to insert them into the script or rearrange tasks within the script flow as needed. The code view provides code completion and syntax highlighting features as one might expect and also ties to the outline view (in the properties pane) that resembles the Ant script outline available in Eclipse.

On the left of the standard layout, you’ll find the tools pane which is well organized with groups of related tasks in collapsible regions. Unused tasks, such as those specific to a source control system you don’t use, can be removed (hidden) from the tool pane using options within the IDE. All NAnt core tasks are included in the tools pane and custom tasks are also available in the tool pane if they are included in the NAnt->Extension configuration of the IDE and scanned accordingly. The grouping for the NAntContrib tasks are already setup, and in a forum discussion with the NAntBuilder developers, I found that there is a (yet undocumented) way to group your own custom NAnt tasks in the tool pane as well.

On the right side of the standard layout you’ll find a familiar properties pane that allows you to drill down into the properties for the selected task. One of the “coolness” factors is the intellisense build into the property fields. For many of the properties, if there is a value for selection that can be logically reference, they are displayed as options as you begin to type into the property field. For example, a property that expects a path for a value will show possible options when you begin to type “C:\” or “.\”, based on the local file system. The properties window is only available in the design view and will be empty (blank) when in code view, but the code completion in code view should make up for the inconvenience. Also, the outline window is only available in code view and will be empty when in design view, but since the design is the hierarchical structure, the outline view would not provide any additional benefit there.

Another familiar element to the interface, which is available both in design and code view, is the pane at the bottom of the layout which includes windows for standard output, watch list, call stack, and errors. The output window displays the standard out from the NAnt process as it would appear in a command window, but with some highlighting to help identify different output elements. From design view, you can drag “property” tasks to the watch list (or type the variable name directly) while stepping through the code in debug mode to evaluate its value in real-time. The call stack window is also useful in debug mode as well if you have a module structure to your build script process.

For screenshots of the IDE, view the screenshots page on the NAntBuilder site.

Debugging in NAntBuilder is fairly standard as well and is triggered by setting a break point in either the design or code views. The break points can be set by simply clicking the left margin area, which then will indicate the break point with a red marker. You then run the build in NAntBuilder, and when it stops on your breakpoint you can step into (or over) each task in the script using the defined hotkeys. The only (important) debug feature I found missing is the ability to break on error as you would in Visual Studio, but that feature has been requested so we might see it in a later release.

I could go on and on about the specific features that make NAntBuilder a great tool, but it’s probably best if you download the 30 day trial version and do your own evaluation. For a comprehensive list of features, take a look at the features page on the NAntBuilder site.

The Wrap Up

Just a few more points I wanted to make before wrapping up this review. First, while I was evaluating NAntBuilder for my project, I had the opportunity to communicate with the developers directly in their forum on the site. I was very impressed with their response times to any inquiry I made, whether it was a bug report or feature request. In some cases of bug reports, they had the code updated, tested, packaged, and available for download within a day or two. This kind of service is not typical from my experience, and it is much appreciated.

Finally, when it came to the decision to purchase NAntBuilder for our project requirements, the cost made it a very easy sell for our management team. At the time of this article, the site license is $599.95 (US dollars) which is a very minor expense when you consider the advantages the tool offers. So if you’re looking at visual build tools, like Final Builder, Visual Build Pro, or Automated Build Studio, add the NAnt & NAntBuilder combination to your product evaluation as well and you may discover a very affordable solution that meets your build requirements.

So I started to wonder, “Is the NAnt project dead?”

Apparently I was not the only one pondering this question as when I typed that question into Google, I found several posts posing the same query. Amongst the results, I found that (again) most of the articles or forum posts on the subject were quite old (in computer years), and I started to worry a bit. Most of the recent content I found on the subject indicated that some were abandoning NAnt for MSBuild since their focus was on .Net builds, while others were moving away from scripted builds to more visually oriented solutions for all their builds. So, I continued my research, determined that NAnt was still a good choice and that the open source community had not failed this great project.

My next step in the “investigation” was to check the project repository itself for activity, and I found that there is recent activity on the project code. Yes, I breathed a sigh of relief at this discovery. Reviewing the project feed shows very recent activity in the form of “Code committed” posts for this year, several of which actually occurred today (July 9th, 2009).

So, it would appear that the NAnt project is still alive and moving forward, even if it’s not publically well known.

So this raises a few other questions:

• What’s been going on since the last beta release (0.86 on December 8, 2007)?
• When is the next release scheduled, and is there a schedule?
• Can the project reclaim its former glory?

If you have any additional information on the status of the project, please holler back. I’m sure there are a good number of developers like myself who would like to be informed of the status and roadmap of the project.