web2project: Finish Line in Sight

I know I've said it before, but this time I'm serious… the End is Near:

web2project is nearing v1.0

We – mostly Pedro – have been pounding on bugs, features, and all kinds of shiny and nifty new bits for the last 9 months.  The most important parts are the UI, performance, and security/permissions.

First, I'm not going to go into the security fixes again, but the permissions improvements are huge.  Not only can you quickly review an individual's permissions by going to the User Permissions Information screen but the system now caches the permissions calculations.  This reduces the overall number of queries on any page by approximately 90%.  Yes, you read that correctly… 90%.

Next, the UI.  As much as I love the tool and what it can do, the User Interface has always needed work.  Although I was one of the people that made the dotProject conversion to Smarty Templates happen, it was the same look and feel as the rest of the system.  There was no significant changes or improvement.  Web2project changes that.  The interface is smoother, cleaner, but basically still has the same structure.

Finally, the performance.  I've found that – depending on system specs – dotProject tended to slow once you got above 200 projects with a 1000+ tasks and effectively die once you reached 500+ projects with 2500+ tasks.  In some cases, it was even possible to hit Mysql's built in max_join_size error.  Between the permissions fixes above and the judicious use of indexes, this is no longer an issue.  In fact, since the default installation of dotProject doesn't have any indexes, you might just apply our indexes to your existing system… even if you don't convert.


So what's holding up the web2proejct release?

At the time of this writing, we're down to 7 issues.  A couple are minor, a couple are major, and the nastiest one – scripting the dotProject conversion – is on my plate.  Once those are done, it's going out the door.

Since ZendCon08 is in just a few weeks, that's my personal target…