Introducing Active Reload and Lighthouse
It’s great to be blogging again! I don’t think I’ve went this long without blogging since I began back in April of 2005. Well, I’ve been really busy and have some exciting news. I have just co-founded Active Reload with Rick Olson of the Rails Core team and we’re on the heals of our first product release dubbed Lighthouse.
Lighthouse: Bringing issue tracking home
Rick and I have been talking about forming a company for some time now. We’ve worked on numerous projects together, with our bread and butter being the Open Source Blogging Application, Mephisto.

After witnessing the success of Mephisto, we needed a place to track its development. While there are numerous issue tracking systems out in the wild, we didn’t much care for them. One of the main problems with an issue tracker is that it requires to much effort and is too big of a distraction. They don’t fit inside your process, but rather force you to break away from what you’re doing to constantly manage tickets. That’s why we’re creating Lighthouse.

We aim to correct the problems with current issue tracking systems and bring some fresh and exciting new ideas to the table. I’ll talk more about our ideas, and how we plan to solve these problems over on the Active Reload Blog, so hop on over there and subscribe to our feed if you’re interested.
Want to know when Lighthouse is released?
We don’t intend to stay in beta long at all, but we do want to have an initial round of testing before we move this baby out into the wild. We’re looking to sign up about 30 or so people who wish to help us test Lighthouse for a week or so. If you’re interested in beta testing, or you’d like to be notified when we release, register for the notification on Lighthouse.com
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Discussion
This looks great. I’m really looking forward to this. But i’m a little bummed out that your name of choice is now gonna totally eclipse our very own homophonous project. I guess, we gotta pack our brass knuckles come RailsConf. :)
Looks super slick and clean. Is it going to be a hosted service? Or BYOBox like Mephisto? (I’m sort of gunning for the latter).
Woah!
I think I may have found the exact thing i’m looking for to replace our private Trac and custom support system over at CrazyEgg and [CENSORED SECRET PROJECT] and maybe even [CENSORED SECRET PROJECT].
Will you offer a discount for OSS software projects?
@Sebastian: Sorry about that man, we’ll be sure to bring our swords to RC. ;-)
@Kevin: Hosted. We don’t have plans to host subversion repositories, but we’re looking into integration through plugins.
@Thomas: We’ve talked about OSS projects briefly, and we want to do something in that area to help the community, but we’re not sure how we’re gonna tackle that ATM.
Looks great. I was lamenting recently about our project tracking software. We’re currently using Version One and I nearly get crushed by the bloat. It seems to me that simple, agile project software shouldn’t be that hard. I’m looking forward to seeing what you guys release.
That looks hot! Justin, is it going to be a free service?
It’s a shame it’s hosted. The team where I work wont commit to hosted services because they get all nervous about it being out there on the ‘live’ interweb (security/privacy).
But that’s them… I’ll definitely give it a go for private projects.
Looks great…was checking out Mephisto just the other day. One thought though…the name. As a ColdFusion developer I was already aware of another bug tracking app called Lighthouse. If possible, please check with them about the name.
http://lighthousepro.riaforge.org/
I’m sure this will be a great app but my first impression of it though is that is a “copy” of Ray Camdens coldfusion app called “lighthouse”.
Like Robert suggested, I would check him about the name.
We’ve talked with Ray, offered to duke it out over a game of Gears of War, but he declined because hw was having problems with General Raam.
We have worked it out though, as we wasn’t aware of his project when we announced. All is well now, flowers are blossoming and the world is a better place and we are living in perfect harmony.
him3868@encytemedia.com
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“One of the main problems with an issue tracker is that it requires to much effort and is too big of a distraction. They don’t fit inside your process, but rather force you to break away from what you’re doing to constantly manage tickets.”
Have you tried out Mylar for Eclipse? Issue tracking can’t get much more seamless than with its repository integration inside the IDE.