ChangeLog: March 6, 2020 — Nearing Beta

These are exciting times, right? While everyone is preparing for the coronavirus, we’ve been preparing for Review Board 4.0 beta 1.

Review Board 4.0 Beta 1

And the coronavirus.

The shelves are getting pretty empty in my local grocery store, but I’ve kept my sanity.

Preparing for Review Board 4.0 Beta 1

We have an internal target date for 4.0 beta 1, which is coming up very soon, but we’re not prepared to release that just yet. Still a couple factors that might need to delay a week.

This beta will feature:

  • Posting and reviewing multi-commit review requests
  • A brand new, streamlined, mobile-friendly administration UI
  • A full move to Django 1.11, with preliminary Python 3 support (which will affect extensions, so get ready)
  • Read-only mode, letting you prepare for an upgrade without shutting the whole server down
  • A new “Overview” mode in the Dashboard showing all incoming and outgoing review requests
  • A new integration for Jenkins CI
  • Live thumbnails for video file attachments
  • Beginnings of accessibility improvements, improving keyboard input, color contrast, and screen reader integration
  • New JavaScript and CSS components usable by third-party extensions
  • An overhaul of the diff parsers, setting things up for some major future improvements to diffing capabilities (including our in-development new DiffX proposal)
  • Removal of a lot of deprecated internal APIs (again, this may affect extensions)

We’re working on the final bits of the administration UI, and expect to be done by end of next week. Everything is in place, with the exception of the Integrations, Extensions, and Security Center pages. But that’s it!

We’ve also been finishing up the work to make our third-party integrations (Travis-CI, Asana, Jenkins, etc.), Review Bot, and Power Pack all compatible with Review Board 4.0, Django 1.11, and Python 3. These are the last big blockers before release.

After all that is done, beta 1 will be a go!

(Assuming none of us get the coronavirus.)

If you are building custom extensions, please get ready to test this beta. Let us know if you plan to test so we can coordinate with you and give you a heads up on what may change.

RBTools 2.0 Beta

RBTools 2.0 features full support for multi-commit review requests. We’ve had the bulk of this work done for a while, but have been really thoroughly testing it in preparation for a beta, which will go out alongside Review Board 4.0 beta 1.

This week, we’ve finished up the work to apply patches from a multi-commit review request (giving the ability to apply all commits sequentially or squash into a single commit), and to fully land changes.

We’re wrapping this up soon. If you test Review Board 4.0 beta 1, you’ll need RBTools 2.0 beta 1.

What else, what else..

Accessibility Improvements

We’re continuing to work toward improving our accessibility story in Review Board. While we’re nowhere close to where we want to be yet, we’ve amended our policies around new UI components to ensure that keyboard usage and ARIA roles are a first-class citizen in any designs.

If you make use of any assistive technologies, such as screen readers, we’d love to talk to you and get your feedback on a few things!

Video Thumbnails

Review Board 4.0 will be making it easier to glance over file attachments for video files. Just like file attachment thumbnails for images and text files give you a preview of the contents, they’ll soon give you a preview of the video as well.

Hovering the mouse over these thumbnails will cause the video to play (muted) until you move the mouse away. Hovering over them again causes the video to resume from where it left off.

This is great if someone’s using video files to demonstrate their feature. We’re hoping to make this the start of some useful UI around videos.

New UI Components

This past week saw the development of several new accessible CSS/JavaScript components, which can be used by extensions:

New Button Classes

Buttons

We’ve historically had a few different ways to show buttons. Any <input type="button" />, <input type="submit" />, or anything with the .btn CSS class would have a consistent appearance, and could be modified by a set of additional CSS classes.

This has been revised to include <button> (which we oddly did not have before) and anything using the .rb-c-button CSS class (the successor to .btn, which is now deprecated).

Button Groups

Button groups

A button group (.rb-c-button-group in LessCSS) is a collection of buttons, packed together either horizontally or vertically, providing an almost toolbar appearance.

Pop-up Menus

Pop-up menus

The new RB.MenuView (JavaScript) and .rb-c-menu (LessCSS) component manages a pop-up menu that can be shown or hidden as needed. It supports full keyboard navigation and ARIA attributes for accessibility.

We’re working on moving to this in every place that involves a pop-up menu, including review request actions (like “Update” and “Close”) and the Account, Support, and Follow menus in the upper-right of pages.

Menu Buttons

Menu buttons

RB.MenuButtonView (JavaScript) and .rb-c-menu-button (LessCSS) implements a type of button that displays a pop-up menu when clicked.

There are two main ways this can be used:

  1. As a single button that will show some text and a drop-down indicator, used just to display the menu.
  2. As a group of action buttons, all packed together (but visually separated), containing a final button that displays the drop-down menu.

The later is great when you want to offer a common action, but make alternative actions easily available.

Like the new pop-up menus, these provide full keyboard navigation and ARIA attributes for accessibility, and are a great building block for extensions to use.

We hope to provide full documentation at a later time on the standard library of UI components we’re building.

New KGB Release Coming

KGB is our Python module for unit tests, which provides the ability to spy on any function and track the calls and results, or override the behavior. It’s incredibly powerful, and we make heavy of use of it in Review Board and all our other projects.

We’ve just fixed up KGB to work with Python 3.8, so we’re preparing for a release pretty soon.

If you’re a Python developer, check out KGB. Tell your friends. Give us some feature requests. Honestly, it’s pretty complete these days, but we need more reasons to bump the version number.

Alright, that’s enough for this ChangeLog.

Coming Up

We may skip next week’s ChangeLog to focus on finishing beta 1, unless we have anything really interesting to report.

If you want to know more, have any questions, or are curious about anything else, please reach out on our community forum.

We’re also on Reddit (/r/reviewboard), Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube if you want other ways to keep up with Review Board and Beanbag.

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ChangeLog: January 16, 2020 — Review Board Status and New Students

Hi everyone. Welcome to the first ChangeLog of 2020! We skipped last week due to the new Review Board 3.0.16 release, so let’s dive in and get caught up.

Review Board 3.0.16

Last Tuesday, we released Review Board 3.0.16. It’s been a long time since 3.0.15, and there are two reasons for this:

  1. Most of our attention of late has been on completing the remaining architectural work on Review Board 4.0 (Python 3 and Django 1.11 porting) and RBCommons user roles and billing updates.
  2. We’ve been trying to carefully design and implement some large backend improvements for repositories and repository configuration, in collaboration with another vendor, and wanted to get it right before we released.

We’ve discussed the repository improvements before, so read that if you want to learn a bit more, but the gist is that we’re giving SCMTools (repository backends) a lot more flexibility in how they present repository configuration, how they’re registered for use in Review Board, and how extra data for repositories get stored. This will lead to some significant improvements in the coming months for a couple of our supported repository types.

Now unless we find some major bug fixes in 3.0.16, it’ll probably be a little while until 3.0.17. We have a backlog of RBTools work we plan to release, and we’re still trying to get 4.0’s architectural rework done.

Review Board 4.0 Status

Most of the rewritten administration UI is in a usable state, and we’re just getting it all ready to be reviewed and landed. After this, we’ll be bumping our Django dependency and performing a bunch of real-world usage tests, just to make sure there isn’t some big breakage some place.

(If you want to learn more about the administration UI work and how it relates to Django and the release, read the ChangeLogs from October 24, 2019, October 31, 2019, and November 7, 2019.)

Once we’re happy, we’ll ship 4.0 Beta 1. Almost there!

New Semester, New Students

Every semester, we take on a batch of CS students eager to work on some real-world project, currently as part of the CANOSP program run by the University of Alberta, Canada.

It all starts this weekend at a get-together in Edmonton, Canada, where we’ll be helping five new students get set up, go over architecture and standards, and start them on their projects.

We’ll talk more about what they’ll be working on next week, but they mostly center around quality-of-life improvements to Review Board.

Wrapping Up The Week

If you have any questions, or anything you’re curious about and want us to cover, please reach out on our community forum.

We’re also on Reddit (/r/reviewboard), Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube (featuring student project videos!) if you want other ways to keep up with what we’re up to.

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