chris horn's blog

As some of you may know, I regularly holiday just outside Roundstone in Connemara. I’ve just come back to Dublin yesterday after some time there again.

If you haven’t yet been to the west of Ireland, I think one of the most striking things is the web of small stone walls that embrace the fields, pastures, meadows, boglands and tracts. Each is made by hand, and almost always as dry stone walls without mortar. They usually are as a result of clearing granite stones and rubble from the fields, and are economic: not requiring mortar, they do not suffer from frost attack, and so little maintenance is needed. At first sight, they all appear similar, but in fact there are different construction styles, with single, double and combination walls as the basic classification. They are malleable: walls can be easily moved and re-configured – gates are not strictly necessary since a few stones can easily be removed and put back again to, for example, let cattle through. Patrick McAfee’s book and website are a very readable commentary.

From ground level, the profusion of little stone walls can appear as a complex pattern, perhaps even fractal-like. But viewed from a high point, perspective reveals the logic of the landscape and the paths – the boreens – lined with walls either side, gently meandering to distant places.

I came back to Dublin last night, and this morning read Martin Banks’, of Reg Developer, excellent overview of Buckminster. Since I first wrote about Buckminster, the team has considerably improved the tool, including the documentation kit. Martin’s article makes use of a bricklaying analogy, and I guess I hinted in my own blog entry that if you are to build structures from re-usable bricks, then it might be useful to have a web site somewhere at which various designs could be published found and compared…

Well, also while I was away in Connemara, www.cloudsmith.com went live. Many of those on the Buckminster team have collaborated to put the site together, and the initial incarnation of the site certainly turned out to have richer functionality than I myself expected in a first iteration. There is a fairly detailed overview on the About Cloudsmith page, but in summary:

• Cloudsmith keeps meta-data about assemblies of software components.

• Software components can be sourced from any number of public and private repositories worldwide. Of course, components from private repositories are only available to those duly authorized to use them.

• Cloudsmith does not store the components themselves: but it knows where they are worldwide and how it can access them in the appropriate repository formats.

• A software publisher – an individual, project, or company – can register one or more specific software component assemblies with Cloudsmith.

• A software consumer – an individual, project, or company – can search and browse for available assemblies; and can readily download and install any particular one – “materialize” in Cloudsmith-speak – onto his local machine (or indeed another machine if appropriately authorized).

In effect, Cloudsmith is building a global map of software components (in various forms: source, binary, versioned, and optionally with test suites, documentation and license agreements). Professional software developers - individually or in a community project or working on a commercial offering – can publish interesting new assemblies of components, sourced across one or more repositories.

One of the neatest capabilities of Cloudsmith is a Cloudlink. A Cloudlink is simply a URL: it can be sent in an email, or given in a blog or whatever. When a Cloudlink is clicked, the software assembly which it denotes is then materialized without further intervention, onto the local machine. This gives a very simple download mechanism: publish a Cloudlink, and anyone clicking on it within a recent-vintage web browser can download your software. In practice, when a Cloudlink is clicked, behind the scenes the Cloudsmith site is contacted, and it resolves the differences between the assembly of software components identified by the Cloudlink, and those already available on the local machine, and then fetches (as appropriate from various repositories worldwide) and downloads the missing components.

Cloudlinking in turn enables “virtual distributions”. A software publisher can create a virtual distro, whose components reside across multiple (eg open source) projects and repositories: materializing a virtual distro requires nothing more than a web browser.

If your project is looking for a simple way to make its software available to the worldwide community; if your project is itself using software from multiple sources and multiple projects; if you want to keep your community regularly updated with patches and extensions; if you want to manage installation and distribution processes; then Cloudsmith should be worth taking a look.

Software components, and configurations and assemblies of them, are very malleable. It is relatively easy to define new interesting configurations, as well as new components. Looking at the world wide activity, and the multitude of repositories and projects, it is easy to become overwhelmed. It is possible to detect patterns, and different styles of construction, but sometimes it can be very confusing to see overall themes, to understand how other people are using configurations, and what changes have occurred.

I’m reminded of Connemara’s dry stone walls. They are numerous, wonderful, simple, easily changed, easily re-built, easily maintained, and as a result have lasted for decades. But in the landscape and up close, they are confusing to absorb and see the overall picture. The perspective of height gives clarity.

Cloudsmith is giving clarity to the construction of assemblies of software components.