The Labs

Cool Projects We Develop.

Our labs produce a combination of internal efforts championed by Pivots and official Pivotal Labs-sanctioned projects.

Pivotal Tracker

We got tired of using spreadsheets, cards and wikis to manage our development process, so we built Pivotal Tracker, an agile planning tool that we use on all of our projects. We've been sharing it with our clients for years, and gotten so much positive feedback that we made it publicly available at RailsConf 2008.

Pivotal Social Media Platform

Parker Thompson led the development a commercial-grade social media platform that we now use on most of our projects.

JsUnit

Edward Hieatt, a principal at Pivotal Labs, developed JsUnit, an Open Source xUnit-style test framework for JavaScript. We use it heavily, and continue to contribute extensions back to the JsUnit project. jsunit.net

GemInstaller

Chad Woolley wrote GemInstaller, a tool that provides automated management of RubyGems. geminstaller.rubyforge.com

Erector

Nick Kallen, Brian Takita and Nathan Sobo are working on an elegant new HTML builder framework called Erector. http://rubyforge.org/projects/erector/

Treetop

Nathan Sobo created an extremely flexible and simple Open Source parser generator: http://treetop.rubyforge.org/

HasFinder

Nick Kallen built an extension to ActiveRecord that makes it easier than ever to create custom find and count queries. http://rubyforge.org/projects/pivotalrb/
Read the blog post.

RSpec

Brian Takita is a key contributor and core committer to RSpec. http://rspec.info/

Desert

Parker Thompson and Brian Takita led development of a plugin engine inspired by Appable Plugins. http://rubyforge.org/projects/pivotalrb/

Distributed Page Cache

Parker Thompson led development on a drop-in extenstion to page caching that lets you expire pages across a cluster of appservers. http://rubyforge.org/projects/pivotalrb/

Fast JSON

Brian Takita created a Ruby gem for faster outputting of JSON from Ruby programs. Fast JSON uses native code to speed up the generation of JSON from Ruby objects. fjson.rubyforge.com

Common Code

We are in the process of open-sourcing other parts of our common library, including our extensions to Selenium and Capistrano.