ReadWriteWeb

The folks at BestVendor.com interviewed 500 developers and compiled this profile of the tools that they actually use. A few stalwarts predominate, such as Git, Eclipse, AWS, Dropbox, MySQL, and Google Analytics. But there were a few surprises too, including 23% using Notepad++ as their text editor and 8% using Heroku to host their apps. Many of the categories are wide open. All of those surveyed are from companies of less than 100 people from around the world.

Today, CollabNet announced Connect, its new integration framework to provide app dev orchestration and management. The big news here is its integration with Atlassian's bug tracker tool JIRA. It also brings the Git source code repository into an enterprise setting that can be used more adroitly by larger project teams. The goal is that your data stays in one place while you move through the development and test lifecycle.

You can download a free trial of Connect here.

There's a notable absence of (conclusive) studies comparing the current acceptance rate of Heroku, the fast-growing cloud platform for dynamic language-based apps, to that of Windows Azure, DotCloud, CloudFoundry and the numerous other players in the suddenly stormy PaaS space. Perhaps only now are these players beginning to be seriously compared against one another for features and service levels.

What Heroku has going for it are three differentiators: 1) extremely simple app deployment, almost turnkey for anyone who already uses Git (for a Windows guy like me, there may be one or two extra steps; 2) as solid a commitment as a company can make to dynamic languages like Ruby, having hired the guy who created it; 3) an "in" with enterprises that would otherwise think Clojure is a kind of paper clip, by virtue of being acquired last December by Salesforce.com and forging a partnership with business consultancy Accenture last April.

One year after acquiring Bitbucket, Atlassian is taking aim at GitHub. The company announced Git support with free, unlimited private Git repositories today. Git support is new to the Bitbucket service, which started around Mercurial repositories.

In addition to Git support, the company also announced a new importer for GitHub as well as importers for other hosted code collaboration services like Google Code, CodePlex and SourceForge.

It's been out for a while, but hasn't gotten a lot of attention. Facebook released Phabricator earlier this summer, an open source collaboration tool for development teams. It's an early release, but already in use by more than 500 engineers at Facebook for normal review, development and sharing of code.

Development of Phabricator is spearheaded by Facebook's Evan Priestley and is being done on (where else?) the Phabricator.org Web site.

Companies and projects focusing on large-scale collaboration might want to start thinking about collaboration in a new way. Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody closed out the second day of LinuxCon North America 2011 with a contrarian look at collaboration. While many treat collaboration as a "love fest" or harmonious interaction, Shirky put forward the idea that productive methods of fighting are the most successful, particularly in open source.

Shirky, who also teaches at New York University, started talking about his "favorite bug report ever." The bug report, for Firefox (#330884), was a corner case where Firefox would show any user what sites that should never save passwords even if selected by another user.

Git.js is a pure JavaScript implementation of Git created by Daniel Benjamin Lucraft. It currently has two clients: a command-line Node.js one, and a API for accessing git.js through HTTP.

Today GitHub announced a client for OSX, GitHub for Mac. The client walks developers through the process of creating a GitHub account and uploading repositories and provides a local admin interface similar to the traditional Web-based one.

Codeplane is a new host for private Git repositories. It offers 2GB of space and unlimited private repositories for $9 a month. By comparison, a Github business plan with 50 private repositories would cost $100 a month. As pointed out on Hacker News, repositoryhosting.com offers a similar service for $6, with the option of buying additional storage space in case you need more than 2GB.

Explaining why he founded Codeplane, founder Nando Vieira wrote "I have at least 40 private repositories, and I don't want to expend $100 on Github's business plan. These projects are mainly side projects, or small freelance jobs I've done through the years, and I want to save them for posterity; who knows when I'll need them, right?"

Database scaling and performance consultant Markus Winand wrote a blog post criticizing NoSQL adoption for performance reasons. "Most SQL performance problems result out of improper indexing," he wrote. "But indexing is not only a SQL topic, it applies to NoSQL as well."

He goes on to say, however, that there are some cases in which you might want to use NoSQL; and he suggests that Git may actually be a NoSQL database.