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Getting a Grip on Google Code
netbuzz writes "Niall Kennedy reports on his blog that Guido van Rossum, author of the Python programming language, has begun showing off his first project since joining Google last year. 'Mondrian is a Web-based code-review system built on top of a Perforce and BigTable backend with a Python-powered front-end,' Kennedy writes. 'Mondrian is a pretty impressive system and is currently in use across Google.' Kennedy's description of Google's current code-review system sure makes it sound like it was in need of an upgrade. 'The Mondrian tool creates a much better workflow by creating task-specific dashboards, in-line commenting, well-tracked statistics, and more,' he writes. 'The application is built on top of Python open source libraries such as the Django framework, smtpd.py mail service, and the wsgiref Web server software.'"
I'm not sure how you decided Perforce is a "barely mid-level player" in the SCM market. Adobe, Google, and Microsoft all use Perforce as their primary source code management solution. (Though Microsoft has highly modified it and calls it something else internally... but my contacts there tell me it's still Perforce underneath.) Perforce does have its problems with scalability, but in terms of merging, collaborating, viewing history, keeping branches, etc, etc, etc, it's pretty awesome.
my blog
I use both Subversion and Perforce. There's one major feature still lacking from Subversion: merge tracking. There's work underway to design, implement, and document this feature, but it's not done yet. This is a huge deal for anyone with lots of branches.
Not that it's all roses with Perforce. My impression is that it doesn't scale very well. Most operations simply lock the entire database. I think it's a reader/writer lock, but it means that (for example) while the hour-long checkpointing pre-backup process happens every night, you can't do any write operations. (And there's a way to do an offline checkpoint, but it's not documented or supported, and is difficult to get right, with bad consequences if you don't.)
Blargh! Mondrian is already an open-source OLAP engine! Seriously, a casual google search could tell you that. And it's not some sf.net abandonware, it's a mature and powerful OLAP Cube engine used by some big-name corps!
Oh, and just to rant a bit more: Python WAS ALREADY THE NAME of the Lisp Compiler used in the CMUCL Common Lisp implementation and lately SBCL. And was relatively well known in computing science at the time Guido was naming python because it is a snazzy type inferencing lisp compiler!
Guido's some sort of naming-dick. What'll he call his next python project? Glibc? Mesa? Gimp?