NOTES

=-- Getting started --=

Fabricate is intended to facilitate various day to day software engineering tasks.

-=- Fabricate as a Search and Indexing tool -=-

Two of the fundamental commands Fabricate offers are `search' and `index' which
both support numerous predicates, modifiers and options with which to customise
the actions performed by the program. Most of the "useful" functionality offered
by Fabricate depends on these features to locate and software in your development
environment.

-=- Fabricate as a Package Manager -=-

Fabricate can be used as a basic package manager on most unix based systems. It
is not a replacement for other OS package managers (apt, yum, etc) but provides
a platform agnostic wrapper around these. In addition to wrapping standard OS
package managers, Fabricate can download software packages from remote locations,
unpack and install them for you. These 'remote locations' can range from links
on the web, to revision control systems, and even to other kinds of 'custom
artefact repository' (if such things present themselves in your own development
environment, as they do with some build tools).

Fabricate is aware of a variety of packager managers for common target environments
so your Haskell dependencies are installed with cabal-install, Java libraries
with maven, Ruby modules with RubyGems, Python code with easy_install and so on.
You can easily override these default tools by telling Fabricate about your
preferred choice instead. In fact, "telling Fabricate about your preferred choice"
is the very essence of how Fabricate works. 

-=- Fabricate as a Build Tool -=-

Fabricate can also help building polyglot software projects and implementing
systems where the unix philosophy (of building lots of little tools to do
specific jobs) can be seen in earnest. If you're sticking with one technology
then the build support Fabricate offers probably won't be of much interest to you.

Fabricate in no way tries to replace any existing build tool(s). Instead, a set of
commands are made available which will execute the appropriate build tool based on
the kind of project Fabricate is looking at. In some cases, no build/configuration
setup is neccessary whatsoever for example when building your own Erlang projects,
build customizations notwithstanding, http://hg.basho.com/rebar is used by default.
Because this tool doesn't require any build files unless you're customizing things,
your project can remain free of build configuration altogether! This approach will
work for some other providers too.

As always, you can always tell Fabricate to do something 'unusual' for a particular
project or replace the general build mechanism for whole categories of projects if
you wish.

-=- Fabricate as a Configuration Management Tool -=-

Fabricate can generate all sorts of useful data to simplify your day job. Some
examples include project skeletons, build files, configuration data, release
notes, change lists (driven from VCS revision histories) and many more. If there
is some data/configuration that you'd like Fabricate to be able to generate
which isn't there by default, you can tell Fabricate about this so it can generate
what you want thereafter.

Fabricate can also be integrated with sysadmin configuration tools in order to
generate and manage system wide configuration. A couple of the forms this might take
are integration with Chef and/or Puppet. You can tell Fabricate about your own off
the shelf or in house tools, whether these are complex packaged applications or
simple scripts and cron jobs. 

-=- Fabricate as a Deployment Tool -=-

Fabricate can be used as a deployment tool as well. Out of the box, this facility is
based on integration with Capistrano, the Ruby deployment framework. Fabricate can
not only run capsitrano deployments, but can automatically generate and configure
application specific deployments scripts (and recipies), plugins and other code that
can be used by capistrano, as well as documentation about your target deployment
environments.

-=- Fabricate as a Software Analysis Tool -=-

Fabricate offers some limited integration with static and runtime analysis tools, such
as code coverage, profiling and tracing libraries. 

-=- Fabricate as a Testing Tool -=-

Fabricate offers some support for software testing. This really falls into three
categories:

1. Running unit and integration test suites (incorporating multiple projects
built in disparate technologies).

Fabricate can run your unit (and embedded integration) tests using the same standard
tools that are delegated to when building and installing software from source. I
probably don't need to mention that you can tell Fabricate about your own, unique
testing tools and/or scenarios by now.

Fabricate is also integrated with some common integration testing tools, such as
Tsung, JMeter, Axiom and a few others.

2. Gathering, collating and presenting metrics from test suites.

Fabricate can be used to "glue together" the results of multiple test suites with
differing output formats. You have complete control over the final results and
as always, the process is highly configurable. Fabricate also ships with a simple,
lightweight web server that provides access to these results over HTTP.