Prophet is a lightweight schemaless database designed for peer to peer replication and disconnected operation. Prophet keeps a full copy of your data and (history) on your laptop, desktop or server. Prophet syncs when you want it to, so you can use Prophet-backed applications whether or not you have network.

SD (Simple Defects) is a peer-to-peer issue tracking system built on top of Prophet. In addition to being a full-fledged distributed bug tracker, SD can also bidirectionally sync with your RT, Hiveminder, Trac, GitHub or Google Code issue tracker.

Today marks the public release of "Cavil", the first versions of SD and Prophet which are ready for general use (though we've been using SD to keep track of its own bugs for over a year). Cavil is the culmination of 16 months of work and includes contributions from at least 20 developers:

A. Christine Spang, Alec Clews, Alex Vandiver, Arjen Laarhoven, c9s, Casey West, Chia-liang Kao, Florian Ragwitz, Franck Cuny, Hans Dieter Pearcey, Kang-min Liu, Kevin Falcone, Robert Krimen, Ruslan Zakirov, Shawn Moore, Simon Wistow, sunnavy, Will Thompson, Yanick Champoux

Two contributors deserve special mention:

First, I'd like to thank Christine Spang. Over the past two summers, she's done an astonishing job of making SD (and Prophet) friendlier and easier to use, better documented and better tested. She successfully got us from "oh yeah, we should have a public release eventually" to today. Thanks, Christine!

Second, I'd like to thank my partner in crime Chia-liang Kao. CL and I designed and wrote 8000 lines of code which formed the core of what became Prophet and SD over the course of a marathon 8 day hackathon.

Prophet and SD should be considered "beta" quality software. They're unlikely to lose data and we've found that they work well for us. Database formats are considered to be stable and we'll go to great lengths to ensure upgradability to new released versions from today forward.

SD supports custom ticket properties, comments and attachments. It uses Prophet's "social" conflict resolution system to ease collaborative work and keep full change history for each and every ticket update. SD ships with both a web interface and a scriptable CLI. It integrates with git and Darcs. In addition to the sync plugins mentioned above, SD ships with read-only support for Redmine. A bidirectional Lighthouse sync plugin is forthcoming.

Prophet and SD are available from CPAN:

http://search.cpan.org/dist/Prophet

http://search.cpan.org/dist/App-SD

Those interested in contributing patches back to Prophet/SD or just living on the bleeding edge can download directly from git via GitHub:

http://github.com/bestpractical/prophet/tree/master

http://github.com/bestpractical/sd/tree/master

Find out more about Prophet and SD at: http://syncwith.us/

Prophet and SD development is sponsored by Best Practical Solutions, LLC. Prophet and SD are released as free, open source software under the MIT license.

If you have questions about Prophet or SD, join us on #prophet on chat.freenode.net or join one of our (currently very low volume mailing lists):

sd-subscribe@lists.bestpractical.com

prophet-subscribe@lists.bestpractical.com

Thanks!

Jesse Vincent

Best Practical