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(Yet another) TechRadar

TL;DR

Inspired by bdargans initial version of a tech-radar I've tried to build my own version of a radar and here it is.

The tail behind

I've stumbled upon a very inspiring Thoughtworks-article by Neil Ford in which he described the ideas behind a technology radar. As luck would have it the company I work for also had the need to establish some kind of communication channel regarding technology and/or tool decisions. Our intranet solution was based on Atlassian Confluence and so I've created a (free) Confluence-Plugin to create and present a technology radar based on that platform.

The frontend wasn't Confluence-specific at all and since Peter H. (hi Peter!!) nagged motivated me to eventually extract the UI-part I've created this repo (with a static data-source).

Usage / Installation

Since I've used this project also as playground for me I've tried a whole bunch of tools to create it (I wouldn't suggest that approach these days again, but it still works). So, assuming you got node and npm installed you could issue the followin' commands and should be ready to go:

$~> cd techradar
$~/techradar> npm install         # will install all dev-dependencies
$~/techradar> bower install       # will fetch all necessary front-end dependencies
$~/techradar> grunt               # will squish everything together

Fire up your browser and open the radars/demo/index.html. You should see something like this:

TechRadar Sample

All the data is served by a static JSON-file radars/demo/radar.js. The structure should be quite self explanatory - change it at will to see your technologies appearing in the radar.

The project can host multiple radars. Just copy 'radars/demo' to 'radars/myradar' to create new one. To build your new radar use 'grunt --radar=myradar'

  • Hovering over a spot will highlight it (as demonstrated in the screenshot)
    • still staying with your mouse over that spot it'll also show its historic way through the radar (if the spot contains a recognizable history - I've created three stops for the docker-spot in the example data)
  • Clickin' on a spot will uncover the current description
    • the spots name will be automatically detected in the text and linked to the tools homepage.
    • you can also directly embed HTML there to add your own links (beware: no escaping is done)
    • to access also the historic descriptions you'll have to click the Histor link a the very bottom of the current description
      • that will uncover another text-block at the bottom of the page
  • Clickin' the ?-sign at the lift upper corner will show a short description about what's the purpose of this radar and each ring etc.

Create your own radar

The project can host multiple radars. To add and manage your own radar:

  1. Copy demo radar
  • cp -R radars/demo radars/myradar
  1. Build myradar
  • grunt --radar=myradar
  1. Open radars/myradar/index.html
  2. Add myradar to your private version control
  • cd radars/myradar
  • git init && git add -A && git commit -m "Initial commit"

With this layout and intelligent IDE i's easy to contribute back to this techradar project and manage your personal or company radar in a separate repository. Everything under radars/myradar will be pushed to your repository while rest of the files use different remote.