Introduction
Welcome to the pulse™ 2.0 early access page! Here you will find new pulse™ 2.0 milestone releases, along with information about what is new in version 2.0.
How To Participate
Would you like to try milestone releases of pulse™ 2.0? It's as simple as following these steps:
1. Download the latest milestone packages from below.
2. If you do not already have a license, you can download one from zutubi.com, or request one directly during the pulse™ setup wizard.
3. Refer to the Getting Started Guide for information about how to install and start using pulse™.
4. Enjoy!
Reporting Bugs/Feature Requests
During the early access program, we expect there to be some teething issues with the milestone builds. If you find such an issue, you can report it in our issue tracker.
This is also a great opportunity to suggest minor features and enhancements that you would like to make it in to version 2.0. Such suggestions can be discussed on the forums or reported directly in our issue tracker.
Our thanks to all who take the trouble to give feedback. You're helping make pulse™ a better product for everyone!
Familiar with Pulse?
If you are familiar with pulse™, you will know that pulse™ runs through an automated upgrade each time you install a new version. Due to the number of changes that have been made in 2.0, the upgrade process is different for this release. Rather than upgrading your data in place, you instead use a special tool to export your 1.2 data into a 2.0 backup archive. You can then restore this backup into a new Pulse 2.0 install to bring your data across.
For further details, see Migrating from 1.2.x to 2.0
Current Release
The latest EAP build is 2.0.7, released on the 25th of June 2008. This release is a beta build of 2.0, with all major features having been implemented. See from the release notes at the end of this page for more details.
Known Issues
We are still catching up with pulse™ documentation during the EAP/beta. Note that as always, more complicated settings ae accompanied with short phrases of help in the UI (using tooltips on help icons). Naturally we will have complete documentation before the final release - much of which we plan to embed right into pulse™ for convenient access.
Automated agent upgrades are not guaranteed to work for 2.0 beta builds. Some breaking changes need to be made to fix bugs that exist in 1.2.
 | Pulse 2.0 is tested primarily in Internet Explorer 7 and FireFox 2. Some testing has been done in Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 3 and Safari, although some further issues are anticipated. It is not yet tested in other browsers. |
What's new
Pulse 2.0 is a major rework, boasting largely new internals that enable important new features. New things to look at so far include:
Configuration UI
The configuration UI has been completely redone. All configuration is now in the one place, under 'administration'. We have used AJAX to create a more consistent interface that is also more responsive.
Templated Configuration
The new configuration system supports templating: a way to share common configuration between related projects (and agents) by inheritance from ancestor templates. You will notice that the configuration system allows you to configure a hierarchy of projects/agents, and shows the inheritance relationship of fields.
New Security System
User and group management has been updated to allow finer-grained control of security. It is now possible to assign more specific privileges to groups using ACLs, controlling access to both projects and agents. It is also possible to configure permissions for all users and anonymous users via two special groups.
Plugins
Support for various tools is being extracted into plugins. Further, the new configuration UI is generated: so plugin authors do not need to write any UI code!
Remote API
The remote API now supports editing all Pulse configuration, and in a consistent manner thanks to the new configuration system. This allows full automation of Pulse via XML-RPC.
URL Scheme
The pulse™ web UI now uses more consistent and predictable URLs. URLs contain recognisable names instead of opaque IDs. They also support virtual names like 'successful' for the latest sucessful build (in place of a build number). This allows for simple navigation by guessing URLs, and easy perma-linking.
Integrated Database Setup
We have long been encouraging pulse™ users to use an external database in production rather than the default embedded database. In 2.0 we have made this easier by integrating database setup into the standard pulse™ setup wizard.
Integrated Help
The new configuration UI now includes the capability to show more detailed help for all configuration. This makes it very easy to access the exact documentation for your pulse™ version - without ever leaving pulse™ itself. it also makes it easy for plugin authors to add their own documentation.
What's missing
We are still working on improving the pulse™ 2.0 UI and on a host of smaller features. These will appear in the coming weeks in further beta builds!
Release Notes
Below are the changes between the EAP builds.
2.0.7
2.0.6
2.0.5
Resolved
