In our last post, we referred to our “dogfooding” Kerika by using for our testing process. Here’s some more information about how we set up our software development environment…

Our Requirements:

• We needed to support a distributed team, of course. And our distributed team had a variety of preferences when it came to operating systems: there were folks that liked using Windows, folks that had only Macs, folks that used only Linux, and folks that liked using Linux as virtual machines running inside Windows… Since we were were developing a Web application, it didn’t make sense – neither from a philosophical perspective nor from a business strategy perspective – to insist that everybody use the same operating system. If we were going to build for the browser, we should be able to use any operating system we preferred: our output was, after all, going to be Java, Javascript and SVG.
• We needed to deploy our software “in the cloud”, and that meant making sure our software could run well in a Linux environment. Microsoft’s Azure service was still relatively new, and, in any case, our back-end developers were more comfortable with Java than ASP.Net, so that fixed Java on Linux as a back-end requirement.
• Our software had to run in all browsers: that effectively meant “modern browsers”, that happy euphemism for browsers that would conform to HTML5 standards. When we started development, we were uncertain about how Internet Explorer 9, which is still in beta, would evolve, but we have been very pleasantly surprised by the evolution of that product. (And a discussion in December with Ziad Ismail, IE9’s Director of Product Management, has since further reinforced our belief that Microsoft is very serious about standards compliance in IE9.)
• We decided early on to build our front-end in Javascript and SVG, rather than Flash. We know of very few applications, even today, that attempt to deliver the kind of user interface combined with real-time networking that Kerika does using Javascript, and it’s not that we like crazy challenges because we are crazy people –we just didn’t want to get caught in the crossfire between Apple and Adobe over Flash. Having to choose between Caradhras and the Mines of Moria, like Gandalf we choose to brave the Mines…

Our choices:

• Amazon’s EC2 and RDS for creating test and production environments; A2 hosting for our development environment. The choice was between EC2 and Google App Engine, and we will talk more in a separate blog post about why we chose Amazon over Google.
• Eclipse for the developer’s IDE: it was cross-platform, and since everyone wanted to stick with their favorite operating system, it was Eclipse that straddled them all.
• Jetty for web server: the choice was between Apache and Jetty, and we went with Jetty. Why? Well, that’s a blog post in itself…
• Git for source code control: we looked at Subversion, but Git is better suited for distributed teams.
• Maven for build management: once we decided on Eclipse, Git and Jetty, Maven kind of fell in place as a natural choice, since it worked well with all of the above.
• Bugzilla for bug tracking: it’s a great tool, with a simple, flexible interface and it has matured very nicely over the past decade.

All of this has worked out quite well, and we would recommend this stack for other startups that are looking to develop Web applications.