After much waiting and a few false starts, it exists!

The Project Exporter is now available to all sponsors.

All sponsors should be contacted within the next 24 hours with a private download link. In addition, a demo will be viewable online within approximately 48 hours.

The current release should be considered an Alpha and is open to suggestions, feedback, guidance and - more than anything - a bit of testing. Although we test extensively and have numerous dotProject projects for testing, we don't have every possible one and there may be oddities with your specific projects.

The more - and more complete - information you give, the faster and more efficiently we can diagnose and resolve any issue. Therefore, please provide feedback/bug reports to support [at] caseysoftware.com with the following information:

Documentation is always the worst part of any software development project.  The Agile guys believe that code should speak for itself.  While that's enough for many people and enough for many snippets of code, it's not always quite enough for all of the right people.

I believe firmly that the ease at which a new person can approach a piece of software demonstrates the community's overall maturity.  The Java community (in aggregate) has an impressive amount of documentation on its libraries.  The creation and standardization of JavaDoc led to much of that, but it still takes a bit of effort from the developers and the community.    

Since my departure from the dotProject team last November, discussion of dotProject in this space has been minimal. There are a number of reasons for that, but the most important is that because CaseySoftware customers are steadily converting over to web2project. They've been happy with the improved performance and UI enhancements and are excited about the development roadmap. Of course, there are always exceptions...

My biggest single dotProject customer is huge and they're using dotProject for all their core operations. Of course, in the past couple months, they've hit a major problem.... performance.

They have approximately 400+ projects with 25% of those active at any given time. In addition, they have anywhere from 150-600 tasks on any given project. No, I'm not kidding. This gives gives them literally tens of thousands of tasks... which is necessary for their accounting and reporting to various government departments and agencies. It is quite literally the core of their operations.

When no one was looking last week, it happened:

web2project became available.

Now to be clear, it's not the full v1.0 release, it's the first release candidate. In case you want to compare this with other projects, here's a quick summary of the differences:

As an update to last week's post - The First web2project Demo - I have... (wait for it)... the Second web2project demo!

http://dotprojectserver.com/web2project/ - admin / testtest

No sensitive information should be added to this system as it is available to everyone who logs in. 

This is the latest snapshot of current development. It is nearly a Release Candidate and will be made available as that relatively soon.

On other fronts, due to the requirement to upgrade existing customers, there is a draft "Upgrading dotProject to web2project Howto" that has been made available to selected customers and partners. Once it is fully validated and we make the release candidate, that will be made available to all.

Well, it's been a long time in coming, but we're getting ever closer to a release.... so here's our first public demo:

http://dotprojectserver.com/web2project/ - admin / testtest

And yes, I do the see the irony in the demo being hosted on the dotProjectServer.com domain.

A couple quick caveats on this one:

First, the system is starting off empty. Feel free to add appropriate things.

Second, the system is not wiping itself automatically. Therefore, there are likely to be problems as people change/add information until I put in the auto-reset script.

Finally, this has *full* debugging turned on. That makes the system slower and downright sluggish in some areas. That is on purpose as the logs are being collected and reviewed.

On a related note, the initial dotProject -> web2project script is in alpha form. It already appears to be quite solid using my 5 years of data as a test bed.

Getting closer...

I still can't announce our official web2project release date, but there are two major things that were just marked off the todo list based on the amazing effort of Pedro...

Table Prefixes - This seems like such a silly thing. In this day of cheap shared hosting, why in the world would you want/need table prefixes when you can just create another database? True, and good point... but the problem is that there are a number of hosting companies (and system admins) that don't give you an additional database. Or - more interestingly - you may have applications that need to report and aggregate information and having all of the data reside in a single database is simpler in terms of permissions, coding, etc.

So in the last week, Table Prefixes have been implemented throughout the system. We're in some final testing, but it appears to work about as expected without any oddities. The best part is that our new debugging interface gives us all kinds of useful bits as we go. This also gave us a second benefit... there is no raw sql anywhere within core web2project. There are some natural implications of that, but I'll let you ponder the ramifications... ;)