Introducing Casserole

We love Chef. It's a brand new systems integration framework, a configuration management tool, a cloud computing automation toolbox, etc, by the Opscode team. If you want to learn more about it, you should read the tutorial slides by Edd Dumbill at RailsConf 2009.

We're progressively deploying Chef in our infrastructure. And, I must admit, like many of us at Fotonauts, I'm still a desktop applications geek. So when I saw this amazing tool, with a REST API, ... I knew I had to write a Cocoa client for it. It has been a side project, something to hack on while a server is deploying.

We're releasing Casserole today as Open Source on GitHub, under an Apache license. You can also download a build there.

This first version is a bit of a preview, but it should be quite useable for Chef users. What can you do with Casserole ? Access to a chef server, explore nodes, registrations and cookbooks (no template content for now due to a temporary Chef REST API limitation), use the search index, live search your attribute tree or index results.

What does not work ? Write access ! The main goal for this version was to exercise most of the REST API and have a polished UI, but write support is not a big task and should happen soon (yes, I too really want to edit this "recipes" field).

Please remember that Casserole is nothing but a side project - although we're using it internally - so no warranty, no support, no schedules, etc. And don't get angry if Casserole shuts down your entire cloud. But hey, it's open-source, you can fix it !

Feel free to send feedback on casserole@fotonauts.com, and to use GitHub issue tracker.

For the Cocoa inclined crowd: Casserole is written in Objective-C in "modern" style, so you might want to take a peek at the source for Cocoa Bindings, NSOperation and Garbage Collection (don't blame me for some patterns: it was my excuse to play with new toys, my first 10.5 only app, yay!).