I’ve had a quick go at upgrading ClockingIT to Ruby On Rails 2.1 and the most difficult snag I ran into was a has_and_belongs_to_many relation with a symbol as the join_table parameter which suddenly lacked the downcase method, and had to be changed to a string.
We’ve been hard at work lately and we’ve implemented a new design which we’re both very happy with. I’ve also ripped out domTT and created my own tooltips implementation, as domTT was way overkill and created all kinds of problems with stuck tooltips. I’ve also changed the ajax working indicator into something I think gives better and more natural feedback.
We’re not quite ready to make a full announcement and bring in loads of people, but if you want to take it for a spin, it’s available at ClockingIT along with more screen-shots and information.
Google Code - Summer of Code - Organization Information
Google has approved 10 ruby projects for the Summer of Code frenzy, and a few of them are looking quite interesting. The one I’m most interested in is
> Code Completion with Type Inference for Ruby Development Tools project
by Jason Morrison, mentored by Christopher Williams
as that would make remembering and discovering new functions a lot easier for a Ruby newbie like me.
I’m getting more and more into Ruby on Rails’ RJS Templates, and I’m really enjoying it so far. It’s so easy to make sweeping changes to the page after an ajax call, all genereated from Ruby code. This functionality allowed me to update the completion percent and time estimates on all affected TaskLists when you edit a Task, using just a small loop and some well placed tags in the appropriate places.
There’s also a periodically\_call\_remote which updates the header showing how long you’ve been working on a task as time passes. Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy way to disable the periodical remote call, but I’ll probably turn it into a more general pinger which will update tasks that have changed on the server so your page doesn’t get out of sync with what’s really there.
The calendar also got a massive speedup. I’d more or less just followed the example that came with the CalendarHelper, but that ends up looping through all your events once for each day — which takes ages when you have more than a couple of events. I ended up building a hash of due dates and the tasks that are due on that date, then just doing a lookup on each date instead. Rendering time for my ClockingIT project (with lots of milestones, due dates, tasks and messages) takes about 1 second now instead of 12 seconds which was the old average.
I’m sure I can speed things up further before we officially launch, but it’s not too big of a problem to bother with now. I need to get the rest of the polish and required functionality in place so we can bring in some more testers.
I managed to get Dynarch’s Javascript Calendar integrated whenever you can enter a date/time in ClockingIT. Looks pretty sweet, and works like a charm — although entering a time might be a bit too clickety. We’ll see how it all works out after it’s been used for a while. At least it looks way better than the default Rails datetime_select which is awful and cumbersome to use.
It wasn’t too much of a pain getting it implemented either, as I found a CalendarHelper which took me most of the way. What took the longest was finding out that I had a typo in my attempt to use the helper, but of course I thought it was the helper that was bugged. 
I’ve finally gotten around to implementing Drag and Drop of a filtered task view in ClockingIT. It took a bit longer than anticipated due to my Ruby newbieness, but I did manage to get it sorted in the end. While I was at it, I ajaxified edit Task / Tasklist, and fixed the popup menu so it doesn’t go outside of the browser window. Also, adding a new message to a task now updates the message count of the task .
I’m beginning to love RJS templates, they really make it easy working with the DOM and let you do updates that affect multiple elements without breaking a JavaScript sweat.
The wife has also come around and agreed that the icons we have today demand too much attention, and she will be toning them down a bit in the coming days.
According to my Milestone view, I’m 71% done with the 1.0 release. Mostly polish and cleaning up left, ClockingIT is really shaping up to be great. Seeing my project manager at work use it on his laptop for the status-meeting we had this week proved to me that it’s quite usable already. Feel free to register an account and start using it to track your projects, it’s of course totally free.
Dr. Dobb’s | Ruby On Rails | May 16, 2006
> It catches your attention when a respected member of the Java development community says Ruby On Rails may be a successor to Java. You’ve heard of Rails, of course. It’s that hot Ruby-based MVC-patterned full-stack framework for developing web applications that babysit databases.
Dr. Dobb’s Journal has a glowing feature on Ruby on Rails this last issue, which you can read online at the above link. I’ve been using Rails quite a bit on a personal level the last year or so, but it’s got quite a bit of proving to do before it’ll be accepted here at work (only Java development so far).
My wife came up with a new name last week, and now we have the new domain and a new portal in place. Have a looksee at it here. Feel free to try it out as well, it’s free to use and there are no strings attached.
Over the weekend, I implemented commenting on tasks and CSS tab-menus, and got the missus to come up with a new set of icons for the popup-menu and other actions. They look a lot better than the temporary ones I had in place earlier. Things are beginning to come together, it’s really helped that we’ve used it internally here at work the last couple of months. Nothing like some Real World usage to iron out interface problems and find bugs.
It’s actually been fun working on ClockingIT again lately, with new features being implemented and lots of polish applied every evening. Expect more to come, I still have loads of things planned which will make tracking software projects a breeze.
We’re finally closing in on a ‘launchable’ version of my pet Project Manager / Time Tracker. I’ve cleaned up the look quite a bit, and implemented a frontpage design my wife came up with. It’s actually quite usable, and we’ve been using it to keep track of a few projects at work with quite a bit of success. As noone reads my little blog, I figured there’s no harm in writing about it here.
Anyways, it’s free to use, so sign up and please let me know what you think. I’m desperate for some feedback, as I think it has great potential even though there might be some rough edges here and there.