Chris Read

A few years ago Martin Fowler introduced me and a few other ThoughtWorkers who were involved in the Continuous Integration and Deployment space to an editor he knew and told us we needed to write a book about what we were doing. The key thing we were focusing on was making sure that quality software could be released to production in a reliable and repeatable way. Software has absolutely no value until it’s running in production. If you can’t get it into production quickly and easily then you’re just wasting time and money.

There were a few false starts, a few changes of crew, but eventually Jez Humble and Dave Farley stuck it out all the way to the end and Continuous Delivery was published this year. No matter what you do in your organisation, if you’re filled with dread at the thought of a new software release then you need to buy it and read it and do what it says. Now. This article will still be here after you’ve ordered it. Although I didn’t have enough time to be a big contributor, Jez would drag me in front of a white board when ever our paths crossed to discuss things and kept on sending me drafts of key chapters that I have specific interest in and so I am proud to have helped in at least some small way.

One of the things he did do was include a mention to a project that Tom Sulston and I started to make configuration management easier. It’s called ESCape, and I’ve written and talked about it a few times in a few different places. As more and more people are reading the book though I’m getting more questions about what the status of the project is and what our plans are going forward.

At the moment the project is in hibernation. We’ve not made any changes for over a year now, and I don’t think I’ll be working on it in its current incarnation any time soon. That does not mean it’s not based on a good idea though! It’s more a problem of implementation.

At its heart, ESCape is supposed to be a simple way to manage a hierarchal key/value store. I like the way the UI works, Dan North even has a wonderful acronym for it that I can’t for the life of me remember right now. The real problem with the current design is how we’re storing the data. Trying to wedge that kind of data into a relation database always felt dirty and I decided to stop before any real damage was done.

What I’d like to do though is to take the existing UI and functionality and use something like Neo4J or CouchDB to store the data. Conversations I’ve had with Jim Webber and Ian Robinson about it were one of the reasons I didn’t start immediately on a replacement as at the time Jim was making plans to write the REST interface into Neo4J. As an early release of it is now available I guess I’ve run out of excuses…