1.1. What is Codestriker?

Codestriker is a web application which facilitates collaborative code reviewing. Authors create code review topics, where the nominated reviewers will be automatically notified by email. Reviewers then submit comments against the code on a per-line basis, and can also view comments submitted by the other reviewers as they are created. Emails are sent to the appropriate parties when comments are created, as an alert mechanism. The author is also free to submit comments against the review comments. Once all reviewers have finished, the author has all review comments available in a structured fashion. All information is stored in a relational database, which Codestriker can search over. All text is stored internally as UTF-8, which supports reviews in all major languages.

Special support is provided for integration with CVS, Subversion, Perforce, ClearCase and Visual SourceSafe. source control management systems, for the display of coloured diffs and for the ability to view original and new files in their entirety to assist in the review process. Codestriker can be optionally linked with a bug tracking system, such as Bugzilla. Other SCM systems will be added in future releases, given demand and help from the developer community. Codestriker can also be linked with LXR to allow for fast lookup of code entities, to assist in the review process.

Codestriker is written in cross-platform Perl. It can run on any variant of UNIX (Linux, *BSD) and has been deployed on Win32 systems (Windows 98 and above). It can be used in conjunction with a number of relational databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and other ODBC-compliant databases. The Codestriker home page is located at: http://codestriker.sourceforge.net. The Codestriker SourceForge project page, which contains information on file releases, defect lists, mailing lists and information on the CVS repository is located at http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/codestriker.

An example Codestriker topic can be seen at http://codestriker.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/codestriker.pl?topic=7063366&action=view. To view the current list of open topics, go to http://codestriker.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/codestriker.pl. From here, there are links to create new topics.

This document is available as a PDF: codestriker.pdf.

A screenshot of Codestriker is action can be seen in Figure 1-1.