From now until the end of 2013, registering on IBM’s JazzHub allows free hosting of source code for public and private projects.
This was just announced so I haven’t been able to dive in head first on this, but JazzHub seems to be an implementation of Rational Team Concert in the cloud that has been set up to import code from github, who also allows free project hosting for open source projects.
There is a small catch here. Your private projects are hosted at no cost to you until January 2015, where fees start to apply. At that time you can either migrate your projects elsewhere, convert them to open source, or decide to pay.
While we here at Baselines Incorporated have always been experts in requirements management, we learned Rational Team Concert when we saw that Jazz was the future platform for the Rational DOORS brand. While Rational Requirements Composer/DOORS Next Generation are not currently at feature parity with DOORS Classic, going towards Jazz allows for a much better backend architecture than the current DOORS Classic settings, which will eventually allow for things like true version control of requirements! (This will be the killer feature that solidifies DOORS Next Gen’s place in the market as the new requirements leader. You heard it here first.)
Git/Github is great for version control. Aside from a bit of a learning curve because of a new paradigm of source code control, I don’t personally have many complaints about it. It’s easy to use when you know how to use it. The simultaneous problem and benefit with git in my opinion is that other than the command line, there’s no standard client to use.
RTC allows use of a command line, explorer shell extensions in Windows, Visual Studio, and Eclipse. Eclipse has a fully configured RTC download and RTC is a plug-in on the Visual Studio side. There are git plugins for Eclipse too (I’m not sure about VS). But RTC was built with Eclipse in mind and so there is just one RTC plug-in for Eclipse.
In any case, if you’ve been wanting to try out RTC for some application ideas you’ve had, there’s really not a lot of reason not to try JazzHub right now.
Feel free to contact us for more information regarding DOORS, DOORS Next Generation, Rational Team Concert and Rational Quality Manager.