Some time ago, we realized that some igalians used Project Hamster to track their daily work, to know exactly when they started working and on what; later, that data was moved to PhpReport manually. So we thought it was a good idea integrating both applications.

We developed a patch to the development version at that time, to add some basic functionality:

• Send a particular task from Hamster to PhpReport.
• Send the tasks of an entire day to PhpReport.

Notice that the communication is one-way only; Hamster doesn’t notice changes done later in those tasks in PhpReport. Besides, the data model of Hamster is different, so users have to complete some missing information after sending the tasks to PhpReport. Nevertheless, that’s better than writing down everything manually…

It looks like this:

And this is what you get:

Lately I’ve been thinking on how to continue the development. The code base of Hamster has changed a lot in the last months, so my patches are now basically useless… But in any case, the data models are different and I’m not very sure about the approach to take.

It seems I’m not the only one with this problem: the synchronization issue has been around for some time in Hamster bugzilla. There were different proposals, but there isn’t an agreement yet. Maybe should I develop a specific PhpReport client from scratch?

Meanwhile, I leave the code for you to check it out and give it a try:

git clone http://git.igalia.com/hamster-applet-phpreport.git
cd hamster-applet-phpreport/
git checkout origin/phpreport-gnome-2.27.91

And for compilation and installation:

./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr
make
make install

The prefix is necessary because the applet server doesn’t look into /usr/local (the default route) for new applets. And this installation will conflict with any installation of hamster-applet you could have done before.

I compiled it in ubuntu lucid (it should work for karmic too, but I couldn’t make it in jaunty) and I needed the following development packages:

python-dev
python-gtk2-dev
python-gnome2-dev
libgconf2-dev

Finally, you can launch the application in an independent window with debugging purposes, using this command:

/usr/lib/hamster-applet/hamster-applet -w

It was a year ago when I posted I will have news about this project soon… Well, at that time, we started a full rewrite of PhpReport, the time tracking web application. Now we have something we are proud to show 🙂 .

Our main problem was that the existing architecture didn’t allow us to grow and improve the application, and there were quite a lot of things we wanted to do: AJAX in the interface, integration with external applications…

So the decision was rebuilding everything, trying to replicate the existing features while leaving room for improvement. The result is an application that currently can:

• Store daily tasks for multiple users.
• Get dedication reports by users, projects and customers.
• Calculate work hours, extra hours and holiday hours.
• Features a basic eXtreme Programming tracker integrated with the dedication reports.
• Features a basic analysis tracker integrated with the XP tracker.

From a more technical point of view, these are, for me, the keys of PhpReport:

• AJAX-ish interface.
• Web services to interact with external applications.
• Modular design to integrate pluggable functionalities.

But there are still a lot of things to do, both in the application and the community around. There are some annoying bugs, missing features, and we need a proper web site, user documentation, bug tracker, mailing lists… I’ll keep you informed here, but as a start point, I’ve prepared a demo website, for you to check PhpReport by yourselves.

• URL: http://demo.phpreport.igalia.com [EDIT: not available any more]
• User/password: admin/admin.

And to start hacking, check out the code with:

git clone https://github.com/Igalia/phpreport.git

Finally, I have to credit Jorge López, who worked as an internship student in this project, for his help. Good job!

PhpReport is one of those projects that are always there, silent but helpful 😉 . It reflects two features of the way time is managed in Igalia: flexibility and trust. Flexibility because each member fixes his timetable; trust because each igalian is responsible of writing down his hours.

In the next months, we’re going to do an effort to boost the development of PhpReport. An internship student and I will work to improve the application and add new features. More information soon!