Unfuddlecfc

A few weeks ago, I went searching for a provider for hosted SVN, I tried a few different services, and in the end went with Unfuddle.com. Over the course of the past few weeks, my team has grown dependent on Unfuddle as part of our work flow, and I have grown to absolutely love the service.

One of the only caveats is that we aren’t used to relying on outside services for that sort of mission critical part of our environment. So the thought of our information out a server that we didn’t control started disaster recovery talk, and one of the important things to make sure we had was a backup of our content from Unfuddle. Now, they were one step ahead of us, they include the ability to ask for backups, which include svn dumps, as part of the service. They go one step further, and actually have this as part of their API.

Being the automator that I am, I automated requesting a backup, checking to see if it was finished, and downloading it, so that we now have fresh copies of our data every week. In the course of doing that I created an Unfuddle.cfc that provided hooks into their API. I decided to share it, and the backup application on RIAForge for a few reasons:

• I know a few CF’ers are using Unfuddle.
• I figured some non-CF’ers might want to functionality enough to give CF a try

It’s not a complete implementation yet. I’ve gotten done as much I need for the backup application. I’m then starting to fill out the features. If there is a feature you would like from the Unfuddle API, please let me know. In any case, check out Unfuddlecfc.

Another thing I have to say is that the Unfuddle guys did an awesome job writing this API (at least as far as I’ve coded). There are just all of these little details that make it very easy to use. It’s really easy to pass queries, and options to the various REST commands, because it takes those options a few different ways. The other thing they did was make sure that responses are very uniform, so it was really easy to write rules for processing their results. Between the API and the app itself, the crew at Unfuddle is a real credit to Ruby on Rails.