Rego’s Everyday Life

We’re really happy to see that with every new release LibrePlan project is translated into new languages.

In LibrePlan 1.2.2 two new languages appeared:

• French: In the past some people had already asked about French translation and finally this language was available for them. The work was initially started by Stephane Ayache and Guillaume Postaire, but finally Philippe Poumaroux did the final effort to complete the translation in order to have French supported 100%.
  

  LibrePlan screenshot in French

• Dutch: This translation was done by Jeroen Baten, who is also participating in the LibrePlan community (for example he sent an script to connect JIRA with LibrePlan).
  

  LibrePlan screenshot in Dutch

In the last version published yesterday, LibrePlan 1.2.3, again a new language has been included:

• Polish: This time it was the Polish language provided by Krzysztof Kamecki.
  

  LibrePlan screenshot in Polish

For the future releases it seems that Czech language will be available too as you can check in Transifex.

We’d like to publicity thank the work done by our translators, that is allowing more and more people use LibrePlan without any language barrier. You guys rock!

Finally, if you miss your language or want to improve, help or contribute in any of the current ones, the process is as easy as join Transifex and start to translate there.

PS: Transifex guys accepted my mini patch to improve the projects timeline RSS feed. Now you can be subscribed to it and it won’t be updated until there is any new translation or change in the project.

Últimamente estiven xogando con PhoneGap (que foi renomeado a Apache Callback, e agora a Apache Cordova) un framework para o desenvolvemento de aplicacións móbiles empregando técnoloxías típicas de desenvolvemento web coma HTML 5, JavaScript e CSS.

SergasApp

O resultado destes experimentos é a aplicación SergasApp, que permite a solicitude, consulta e cancelación de citas no SERGAS (Servizo Galego de Saúde) para o que emprega o Servizo de de Citas de Atención Primaria que proporciona o SERGAS.

Por outra banda, SergasApp proporciona un sistema para almacenar información de máis dunha tarxeta sanitaria, de xeito que as operacións anteriores (solicitude, consulta e cancelación de citas) poderán facerse dun xeito cómodo para os diferentes membros da familia unha vez configuradas as súas tarxetas. Para a configuración das tarxetas, a información necesaria é a mesma que se solicita no Servizo de de Citas de Atención Primaria, para isto proporciónase un formulario moi básico sen ningún tipo de validación polo que hai que ter coidado cos datos introducidos ou a tarxeta non funcionará.

Pantalla principal da aplicación

SergasApp está dispoñible para diferentes plataformas móbiles coma Android, BlackBerry, Symbian e WebOS (aínda que só foi probada en Android e BlackBerry) é pode descargarse dende a súa propia páxina web: http://mrego.github.com/sergasapp/

No caso de Android tamén a podedes atopar no Android Market (agora Google Play).

Polo momento non está dispoñible para iOS, pero podería estalo nun futuro xa que a tecnoloxía empregada para o seu desenvolvemento así o permite (ler máis abaixo para máis información).

Cabe salientar que a aplicación non é oficial, tan só é un experimento e seguramente teña múltiples erros. Polo momento cumpre as miñas necesidades para a petición de citas, pero pode fallar nalgúns casos ou deixar de funcionar en canto o SERGAS faga calquera cambio na súa web. Para iso convídovos a probala e enviarme calquer tipo de problema que atopedes.

Sobre o desenvolvemento

SergasApp foi desenvolvida empregando PhoneGap como plataforma base, jQuery e jQuery Mobile para a interfaz.

Como se explicou anteriormente a aplicación emprega o Servizo de de Citas de Atención Primaria de xeito que mediante peticións HTTP (GET ou POST segundo o caso), e procesado o HTML resultante con jQuery vai creando as diferentes pantallas para permitir as diferentes operacións. Isto provoca que calquera cambio que faga o SERGAS na súa web, ou calquera caso que non fora probado fará que a aplicación non funcione de xeito adecuado.

Para a xestión das tarxetas sanitarias empregouse a API de almacenamento de PhoneGap que permite a creación e uso dunha base de datos sinxela (neste caso só con unha táboa coa información das diferentes tarxetas configuradas).

SergasApp é software libre e está publicada baixo a Licenza Pública Xeral de GNU versión 3 (GNU General Public License version 3), podedes descargar o código fonte dende o repositorio Git: https://github.com/mrego/sergasapp. Polo que calquera contribución será benvida

Por outra banda, para a creación da aplicación para as distintas plataformas empregouse o servizo PhoneGap Build, moi sinxelo de utilizar xa que está integrado con GitHub e simplemente indicando a URL do repositorio xa constrúe a aplicación para os diferentes sistemas operativos.

Por último para a creación da páxina web utilicei Bootstrap e o soporte de páxinas web de GitHub. A páxina non é ningunha maravilla, pero quería aproveitar para probar isto tamén.

Búscase colaboracíon

Coma xa se explicou, SergasApp é un experimento polo que estaría encantado de recibir os vosos comentarios sobre o seu funcionamento, problemas, melloras na interfaz, un novo icono ou calquera outra cousa. Ademais podedes empregar o bugtracker para informar de calquera bug, solicitar novas funcionalidades ou enviar algún parche.

Por outra banda, non estou moi posto no mundo de Apple polo que pido disculpas anticipadas se o que digo aquí non ten sentido. Semella que para poder xerar a aplicación para iOS dende PhoneGap Build é necesario ser, o que eu chamaría, “iOS developer” (hai que configurar a segunte información iOS Certificate e Provisioning Profile Pair). Polo que se algún de vós cumpre os requisitos e quere xerar a aplicación para iOS e subila á Apple Store, estaría máis que agradecido

Espero que disfrutedes co meu último experimento!

Last weeks in Igalia I’ve been working in a new feature that will be included in the next LibrePlan releases.

Summing up, the new feature consists of providing a method to monitor the cost of the different projects inside LibrePlan based on the money spent regarding to the original budget. Before in LibrePlan you could monitor the cost based in hours reported regarding to assigned hours, but it was not possible to do it checking the money spent.

Feature description

The result of this new feature from the users point of view has two main parts:

• A new field called budget has been added together with the hours input for any task in the WBS view. Now, the user can specify the budget for every task.

  BTW, this field is also available in projects and tasks templates.

• A new bar over the tasks in the Gantt view. This bar represents the money consumed at this moment comparing to the task budget. Then, you can check the progress of your tasks regarding the money you have reserved for it and the real amount spent.

In order to calculate the money spent in a task, the application uses the information in the work reports related to the cost categories of the different resources and the type of hours devoted to each task. Using all that entities, LibrePlan is able to calculate the how much money you have already spent to perform a concrete task.

Some screenshots

The new budget field can be edited from two places:

• WBS view:
  
  

  New budget field in the WBS view

• Details tab in task edition pop-up:
  
  

  New budget field on task edition pop-up

The new money cost bar can be enabled/disabled with a new button in the Gantt view:

Money Cost Bar in Gantt view

The information about the exact money spent can be read in two places:

• Task tooltip in Gantt view:
  
  

  Information about budget and money spent on task tooltip in Gantt view

• Imputed hours tab in task edition pop-up:
  
  

  Information about budget and money spent on imputed hours tab in task edition pop-up

About the implementation

As you know LibrePlan is entirely a free software project. Not only its source code is released under AGPL, but because of we do all the development in an open and public environment. Like for any other feature developed in the project you can read the analysis and implementation notes in the project wiki.

About the implementation issues, I’d like to highlight the new class MoneyCostCalculator which is in charge to calculate the cost of any task in terms of money. This class is only used for the new feature explained above, however in the future it could be useful to create some new reports, add money cost information to earned value chart or use in other parts of the application.

We hope you enjoy this new feature! Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any question about LibrePlan. And remember that Igalia offers a wide range of services around LibrePlan, just in case you need our help

First of all, I’d like to announce that in a few days LibrePlan 1.2.1 will be released. This is a minor release including lots of bufixes done since 1.2.0. Thanks to all the users for reporting the different problems you have found in the tool, with the new version you’ll have an improved experience using LibrePlan. For those who still don’t know, you can report us any issue in project bugzilla or directly talk to us in #libreplan IRC channel on Freenode.net, we’ll try to fix it ASAP to be included in the next releases.

But as you can guess from the post title, the main topic I wanted to talk today is about the Italian translation of LibrePlan. Giuseppe Zizza has done a great work during the past weeks and LibrePlan 1.2.1 will be 100% translated into Italian language. He has used Transifex to do the translation and he has translated both UI files and reports files, so Italian is completely supported. I’d like to thank him again for the effort and his collaboration with the project. Grazie Mille!

Finally, we’re really glad to see that LibrePlan is available in more and more languages as time passes. So, if you still miss your language in LibrePlan, feel free to go to Transifex and add it by yourself or collaborate with other people in the translation. As you can see it will be included in future versions of the project.

I’m sure that you have already notice it, but last LibrePlan version comes with a new website that you can visit at www.libreplan.com. The new website has been designed by Opsou (authors of the new logo) and sponsored by Igalia (the main company behind LibrePlan project).

About the website I’d like to explain the different sections:

• Frontpage: Where you can find a few short texts explaining the most important features of the project. Together with a list of news (mixed with imported tweets from @libreplan) around the project and several links to other website sections.
• Info: Is divided in 4 subsections where you can find different information about LibrePlan. From the special features that make it different of other planning tools to project history, documentation and license data.
• Features: Consists of a comprehensive description of all project features. Features are grouped in different subsections and provide screenshots to understand them better.
• Services: That section contains the main services provided around LibrePlan and the companies involved. As you can see different services are explained in each subsection: consultancy & training, customization & development, deployment & SaaS and, also, how to join us and get involved in the project. If you are interested in any of them you can contact us in the last section of the website.
• Contact: A section with information about the different ways to contact us in order to request help, support or whatever you need around LibrePlan.

Apart from the main website there are also other services around the project:

• LibrePlan Planet: A blog aggregator where you can find all the posts done by the development team about the project.
• LibrePlan Demo: On-line demo to play with last LibrePlan stable version in order to test it and check its main features.
• LibrePlan Development Wiki: Wiki with information useful for project developers and contributors. All the development around LibrePlan is coordinated and documented with this wiki.
• SorceForge.net Page: LibrePlan uses SorceForge.net infrastructure. In this page you can find the different resources around the project: published files, mailing lists, user forums and source code repository.
• LibrePlan Bugzilla: Bug tracking tool to report and manage issues in the project. Anybody could report any problem, error, bug, issue there and the development team would take care to fix it as soon as possible depending on the different priorities of the moment.
• LibrePlan Jenkins: We use Jenkins for Continuous Integration (CI). Every night LibrePlan project is built and tests are passing for both PostgreSQL and MySQL databases. If any problem happens, developers are automatically notified in order to fix it.
• LibrePlan Nightly Builds: Taking advantage of project being built every night, we have an unstable deployment with the last developments done. This is a comfortable way to check the last features implemented in LibrePlan, however it’s not valid for a production environment as it’s not so tested like a stable release.
• LibrePlan Sonar: Sonar is a tool to check software quality. LibrePlan code is checked in order to detect and fix the most important issues.
• LibrePlan Maven Repository: LibrePlan depends on some specific packages modified by the development team that are not available in Maven central repositories. For that reason we have our own Maven repository in order to ease users and developers to download modified packages used in the project.

After reading it twice the list is quite bigger and we’re already thinking in other stuff (we’ll keep you informed).

Finally, I’d like to wish you all a happy new leap year!

Maybe you don’t know Transifex, an open source platform for software projects localization. It supports a great variety of files including the two kind of translation formats that we use in LibrePlan:

• .po: GNU gettext localization system. The whole LibrePlan application but reports is translated with this kind of files.
• .properties: Standard Java localization files. We use this kind of files in LibrePlan reports generated with JasperReports.

From now on, LibrePlan translators wouldn’t have to deal with these files if they don’t want to. They can use directly Transifex.net to translate LibrePlan to different languages. The main advantage, is that you just need a browser to translate all these files. We think that this is going to make translators’ life easier.

As you can see in the image, LibrePlan is fully translated into: English, Spanish and Galician. Moreover, it’s almost 100% in Portuguese, and around 80% in Russian.

Finally, I’d like to thank our translators for their hard work, we’re really happy to count with their contributions. And, I’d also like to encourage any other people to help us to have LibrePlan available in more languages (some new languages are already ongoing). Now, it’s going to be easier than ever.

We’re starting September and the first release using LibrePlan name should happen during this month. We’ve a small delay regarding our initial plans but we think that we should be able to have something ready more or less by the end of the month and release LibrePlan 1.2.

The new logo has been designed by Opsou and we’re really happy with the final result, you can read more information in their blog (in Spanish). Now Igalia is collaborating with them in order to create a nice new website that should have a draft version soon

During the summer the team has enjoyed some holidays, but we’ve been working hard in the future LibrePlan release. You will find a lot of interesting changes in this new version:

• Migration to ZK 5: This required a great effort that was started by Farruco Sanjurjo in summer 2010 during an Igalia internship, and we’re currently closing latest minor issues regarding this task. Thanks to this change LibrePlan performance has been improved with simultaneous users.
• Prevent lose changes: Several users have reported that sometimes they lose some changes because they forget to save before moving between perspectives in a project. We call perspective to each different view LibrePlan provides over the same data: Gantt view, WBS, resource load, advanced allocation. We’re doing some changes in order to mitigate these issues, in LibrePlan 1.2 the different perspectives are going to share the same state, so users will be able to change between them without losing any change (more information in the mailing list thread).
• LDAP support: ComtecSF guys have been working in this task that is ready in development branch since some time ago. So, from now on you don’t need to register all the users in LibrePlan if you already have a LDAP available; moreover you can configure the matching between LibrePlan roles and LDAP groups.
• Functional tests: Like we think that stability is a really important feature for a project like LibrePlan, we have started to use Sahi to create some functional tests (more information in Javi’s blog). This work is been done by Pablo Fernández during his master practicum in Igalia (in Spanish).
• New translations: This week we’ve received the Russian translation by Pavel Rudensky that you can already test in the LibrePlan on-line demo, thanks Pavel for your great work . Besides, other people is working in some translations too, so if you want to have LibrePlan in your language you can help us following the instructions at wiki. If you have any doubt you can contact us on #navalplan IRC channel at Freenode.
• Other: As usual we’ve fixed lots of issues and done some other minor tasks that you will enjoy in the new version. And also released two minor versions with bugfixes: 1.1.2 and 1.1.3.

This is just a small update about the upcoming LibrePlan 1.2 release; in the official announcement you’ll find a more detailed description. Now let’s move to code again, happy hacking!

One of the important features of NavalPlan is the integration with other software like, for example, ERPs. This integration is done with different web services provided by the application.

When we talk about NavalPlan integration we usually explain two different ways:

• With 3rd party applications: Allowing connect your ERP with NavalPlan to send your project data, resources and even the hours worked by them.

  In order to send data to NavalPlan or extract data from it you will need to use the implemented web services. I’ve been writing a small document explaining how to use and test NavalPlan web services, as some users where lately asking the same questions about this topic. There’re web servicies for a lot of entities and it’s not hard to develop a new one if needed.

• With other NavalPlan instances: Sending parts of your project to subcontractors allowing to report project progress. This is done in the main interface of NavalPlan with different visual options.

I hope you find this new document useful and now you can understand better how NavalPlan web services work.

It’s been over 4 years since I joined Igalia back in April 2007. This has been a really nice period in my personal and professional life, I haven’t stopped to learn from the beginning and enjoyed the time with the rest of Igalia crew. Following the expected path, past month I’ve become parter and co-owner of the company, which makes me feel really happy and proud. It’s really great share this experience with all you guys .

On the other hand, last weekend of May, we arranged a new Igalia Summit, this time in Palas de Rei (Lugo). As usual I didn’t miss the chance to attend and I took advantage to meet the last igalians joining the team and enjoy the weekend there. Even being a poor guitarist, I dared to join the Igalia Blues Band (the band that doesn’t play blues) .

Like my last times in Igalia are fully attached to NavalPlan, I’d like to give a update in project as I haven’t written any posts during May (this could mean that we’ve been working really hard in NavalPlan 1.1 release):

• Back in May Diego Pino presented NavalPlan at LinuxTag 2011 in Berlin (see the slides with some demo videos).

• A new company, ComtecSF, is joining the development team together with Igalia and Wireless Galicia. They are currently working in LDAP integration, I’d like to thank Ignacio Díaz and Cristina Alvariño for their work and collaboration.

  More companies are showing interest in the project too and, as time passes, more users appear.

• Version 1.2 is planned for September and roadmap is already defined. This will be the first version using the new name LibrePlan 1.2, we’ll try to have the new website ready on time.
• Finally past Tuesday, the 7th, we published NavalPlan 1.1.1, the last stable release, with several performance improvements.

PS: If you haven’t tried NavalPlan yet, you should give it a try. It’s going to make your life easier in your daily project management tasks and it’ll help you to manage and plan your projects and resources.

Lately we have been teaching training courses for NavalPlan users and developers. These courses are a great opportunity to see how people uses the application, which allows us to detect different usability problems in some windows.

As time passes, project is gaining some relevance, for example NavalPlan will be present at LinuxTag 2011. This implies that more people are starting to use the application and, accordingly, starting to report more bugs.

We’ve detected a problem in the error messages in NavalPlan, as currently they’re not informative and just show a basic message when some runtime error appears. Moreover, in some cases users don’t have access to server logs, therefore they can’t send us more information that a screenshot with the error message shown.

We’ve modified the way errors are reported to users and now NavalPlan shows more comprehensive information about the exception including stacktrace. This will make user’s life easier when detecting some issue in order to report them using the bugzilla, without needing to dig into the logs.

NavalPlan example error message

As you can see in the picture, apart from error message, exception type, status code and stacktrace are shown. Stacktrace appears into a textbox in order to make easier copy&paste the information.

For the future, we should study the possibility to add some button to allow users send the information directly to the development team via e-mail, web service, …