Review Board and Djblets...

I’ve been looking a lot lately at getting a tool together that allows developers to easily set their projects up and encourages a good workflow without being forced into a specific paradigm. For instance, I think it’s a good idea to review before commit, but some projects only have a couple devs, and that can be painful when the other is out on vacation.

If you haven’t seen Review Board, you should take a look. They’re well on their way to a 1.0 release, and I have to say: it’s come a long way since I first saw it. It’s looking really sharp. They cleaned up the UI considerably, and have started supporting multiple VCSs. They’re also heading down the path of providing post review support (review after commit) as well. I like a lot of what they have done. However, I’d like the option of doing it both ways on the same project (review before commit when we can, and review after commit when the other dev is out for a bit). So I’m really eager to see how things shape up after 1.0. I’m definitely excited about it.

There is an internal component that I find very interesting though: Djblets. It’s part of Review Board, although packaged separately. It scratches a few itches: helping to move your Django instance to under a specific url, some nice registration and authentication options, caching, and datagrids. The last one is the one I find most interesting. It helps you do sortable tables, and linking, all relatively pain free.

Chris Hammond has written up a few articles about how to use Djblets. Take a peek and see if it scratches your itch as well!