Dan Moore posted about my Google Projects idea and apparently Google is already doing this. It’s called Google Code and is available at http://code.google.com.

Naturally I needed to see what they had done with it. First off they decided not to tag it as beta like they do so many other things they release. Here’s the logo without the beta:

Second, this product is really more like alpha, but has some good stuff. Here’s what I did:

1. Logged into my gmail account
2. Hit Google Code
3. Tried to make a project named “Bluprints”
4. Google code told me this was a SourceForge project and sent an email to that project owner to ask if I could use the same name. Since I’m also the source forge owner, I allowed it (this time)
5. Unfortunately after I agreed to release the name I had to re-enter the project info into Google Code. This sucked and they need to fix that issue.
6. I re-entered everything and went to the project homepage.

Okay, now here’s what they got:

• Project home page with nothing on it and not much control. You can add links to other project pages, blogs, etc.
• Issue tracking
• SubVersion
• And minimal admin for the content

This isn’t bad for a first release. I do like that you can tag everything, even bugs, for easy searching. This is really going to help the open source search that Dan has been talking about. I also love the simple design that shows you the information you need without any crap like ads or the like.

As far as I could tell you can only use SubVersion and issue tracking and nothing else. For the most part this is okay because you can easily link to a Google Group for mailing list and discussion, and you could link to a Blogger account for blogging. No wiki or forums yet either.

The largest missing feature that makes this unusable is you cannot release project files unless they are on other servers somewhere and you put a link to them in your project description. This is really a deal breaker for me. In fact unless they step up to the plate and offer me a way to release files on Google servers using a simple API (so I can do it from Ant/Maven/Savant), it just another project hosting site and I probably wouldn’t invest the effort in moving my projects over. I’ll definitely send them this link and hopefully they can add these features. If they do I can guarentee everyone you’ll be downloading Savant, Bluprints, and Verge from Google in the future.