TJ2 Users: Why haven't you switched to TJ3 yet?
Chris Schlaeger
you may have read in the 0.0.11 announcement that I'm planning to
release the first stable version of TJ3 this year. This would imply,
that TJ2 will then no longer be maintained. It kind of is already as
many Linux distros have dropped it and it becomes increasingly
difficult to build it.
So what's holding you back from using TJ3?
Is it the missing GUI? If so, I'm sorry, but TJ3 will not going to fix
this. If you can't live without the GUI, either stick to TJ2 as long
as you can or look for a new tool in the long run.
Is it the lack of stability of TJ3? TJ3 still has some rough edges in
the more advanced features like the built-in web server and the time
sheet handling. But the core functionality of TJ3 isn't any less
reliable than TJ2 at this point.
Is it the lack of backwards compatibility? TJ3 requires some changes
to your TJ2 projects. Especially the report definitions need to be
rewritten. There is a section in the TJ3 manual that explains the
necessary changes.
Anything else? What showstoppers prevented you so far from switching to TJ3?
Tell us about it! I'm not promising to fix them all, but at least I
like to hear about them.
Chris
Pierre-Yves
The main reasons why I still use TJ2:
- It is faster. You can very quickly build and see the schedule.
- The interactivy of the GUI improves the ability to develop the
schedule (Verification of dependencies, sequences, resource
assignement, critical path, resource leveling, ...).
These two points makes, to me, the use of TJ2 mandatory when you have
to regularly update the schedule and task definition.
I use TJ3 in a later stage of the planning process, for reporting.
Pierre-Yves
Tony Daly
I'm using TJ2 in Ubuntu and TJ3 in Windows. The thing that's stopping
me using TJ3 in Ubuntu is that I can't seem to install it. A
repository that I could add to my list of software sources for the
stable version would help significantly.
Cheers
Tony
Tony Daly
I have finally managed to install and successfully run it. The install
wasn't the problem, it was trying to find out where it had been
installed and how to run it, that turned out to be tricky.
Chris,
The report that I found extremely useful in TJ2 was the accounting
html report showing cash flow forecast and profit & loss. I can't seem
to find it in TJ3. Is it there, but I just haven't seen it, or will it
be made available (hopefully, very soon)? If it isn't going to be made
available I might have to stick with TJ2.
A decent syntax checker would be fantastic, either a plugin for an
existing editor or just an updated editor from the TJ2 GUI. I wasted
about an hour because I didn't spot a missing quotes. I only found it
when I opened the TJ3 file in the TJ2 GUI, but that reported errors
that weren't TJ3 errors.
Regards
Tony
Chris Schlaeger
> Hi Chris,
>
> The main reasons why I still use TJ2:
> - It is faster. You can very quickly build and see the schedule.
Ok, that's certainly a valid point. I haven't optimized the scheduler yet.
> - The interactivy of the GUI improves the ability to develop the
> schedule (Verification of dependencies, sequences, resource
> assignement, critical path, resource leveling, ...).
The TJ3 reports should provide you all these infos. The GUI is clearly
more efficient in finding the corresponding line in the editor. But
for the rest, TJ3 reports should be just as good.
Chris
Chris Schlaeger
> I have finally managed to install and successfully run it. The install
> wasn't the problem, it was trying to find out where it had been
> installed and how to run it, that turned out to be tricky.
Can you elaborate this a bit more, please? I thought this was fairly
well described in the TJ3 user manual. If there is a gap, I'd like to
fix that.
Chris
Frederic
it's been some time now that I have used TJ2/TJ3 but here are my 2
cents :
I still prefer a GUI over the html/text reports for the type of
projects I'm involved with (say < 1000 lines) :
The GUI is a lot faster to get to the information whereas with the
html reports I seem to be forever scrolling up/down left/right or edit
the report section of my planning to see what I want on the correct
width etc.
This is compounded by:
1) the fact that TJ3 is much slower than TJ2 so that the editing the
report sections to see more clearly what I want is really a
frustrating step.
2) the html color scheme isn't really that great and I find it more
tiring to work a long time with it.
Also the better link between the GUI and the .tjp/.tji files works
better for me.
Well, I guess it won't bring back the GUI ...
On the positive side, but that is really for both TJ2/TJ3, I very much
liked the approach of human readable .tjp and .tji text files to code
the planning information.
I agree that TJ3 does a lot more to automatize reporting and project
management but I don't use these features.
Frederic
Grégoire Barbier
Le 02/04/2011 19:38, Chris Schlaeger a écrit :
> So what's holding you back from using TJ3?
1) Am I the only one to dislike change here? ;-)
2) Until know I never tried TJ3, regarding it as unstable. Since you
state it is no longer unstable, I should give it a try. And will.
3) Until know I hoped that TJ3 would have a GUI in a near or far future.
Not having any GUI won't be a good point. It _may_ not be a good point
for me as a user, but especially it is _very likelly_ to be harder to
convince some co workers of mine. Never mind I'll try TJ3 anyway. In
worst case I'll stick to TJ2 the longer I can as you suggest...
Regards.
--
Gregoire Barbier :: g (at) g76r (dot) eu :: +33 6 21 35 73 49
Sam Elstob
On Apr 13, 11:10 am, Frederic <frederic.duro...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> 1) the fact that TJ3 is much slower than TJ2 so that the editing the
> report sections to see more clearly what I want is really a
> frustrating step.
>
time you make a change to reports? If so I agree. It would be nice
to have a "generate reports only" option so I could quickly make
changes to the reports. I guess it could be achieved manually by
exporting the project first and then generating reports from the
exported version. This feels a bit fiddly though.
> Also the better link between the GUI and the .tjp/.tji files works
> better for me.
>
editing .tj[ip] files.
If it's of help to someone I have the following "hotkey" in vim to
save and check the TJ syntax when i press F6.
map <F6> :wall<CR>:!tj3 --check-syntax dev-plan.tjp <CR>
It's obviously hardcoded for my file at the moment but it should be
simple enough to make the file name automatic.
Kind regards
Sam Elstob
Chris Schlaeger
get a sense of what TJ3 is still missing. I'd like to comment on some
of the issues that have been raised:
* Missing GUI
This is definitely a big issue for some TJ2 users. As a long-time KDE
developer, you don't have to tell me the advantages of a GUI. But a
GUI is a lot of work that takes time that I don't have. If somebody
wants to step up and develop a GUI (KDE4/Qt4 apps preferred ;) I'm all
for it.
In the mid-term, there are two features that the GUI provides that I'd
like to address even without a GUI.
1. Click on property to edit it in the source file. This should be
doable without much effort with the built-in web server and the remote
controls for editors such as vim and emacs.
2. Folding support for tasks and resources. This is more work, but
dynamically rendered reports via the built-in web server could help
here.
* Performance
Depending on your project, TJ3 is about 3 - 15 times slower than TJ2.
With Ruby 1.8 you'll lose an additional 3x. If speed is a concern for
you, you should run Ruby 1.9.2 or later. As mentioned, the scheduler
is not yet optimized at all. If I have some time, I'll work on this.
* Change
I guess I can't do much about it. The concept for TJ2 was created 10
years ago. Since then, CPUs are a lot faster and now have many cores,
PCs have a lot more memory and new programming languages showed up.
TJ3 just takes all this into account.
Chris
Frederic
Yes I basically run the whole scheduling again after having changed
e.g. which tasks to show for what period. For my project and in TJ3
0.0.7 this took close to a minute (I tried again on 0.0.11 but
something is broken ... need to fix that first).
Showing all the tasks for the whole project period would lead to a
very large html page leading to lots of scrolling. In the GUI I could
easily collapse the tasks I was not interested in.
The GUI also allowed to just right-click->edit a task line shown and
it would put you in the text editor right on the line describing the
task : so very easy and no useless scrolling first in the file manager
to find the right file then in the text editor to the appropriate
line ... all of this obviously allowing to keep my train of thoughts
much more efficiently.
But I guess those days are over ...
F.
Frederic
Yes I basically run the whole scheduling again after having changed
e.g. which tasks to show for what period. For my project and in TJ3
0.0.7 this took close to a minute (I tried again on 0.0.11 but
something is broken ... need to fix that first).
Showing all the tasks for the whole project period would lead to a
very large html page leading to lots of scrolling. In the GUI I could
easily collapse the tasks I was not interested in.
The GUI also allowed to just right-click->edit a task line shown and
it would put you in the text editor right on the line describing the
task : so very easy and no useless scrolling first in the file manager
to find the right file then in the text editor to the appropriate
line ... all of this obviously allowing to keep my train of thoughts
much more efficiently.
But I guess those days are over ...
F.
On Apr 14, 11:19 am, Sam Elstob <samels...@gmail.com> wrote:
András Murányi
Showing all the tasks for the whole project period would lead to a
very large html page leading to lots of scrolling. In the GUI I could
easily collapse the tasks I was not interested in.
This could be easily achieved with JavaScript. An example that uses the jQuery framework:
http://www.javascripttoolbox.com/jquery/#expandablerows
Andras
Tony Daly
I'll put together a step-by-step guide on how I got TJ3 to run on
Ubuntu and send it to you.
Regarding my question about the cash flow forecast P & L report: Is
that report available in TJ3? Can I help with anything to make it
available? It would really make TJ3 a fantastic project reporting
tool.
Thanks
Tony
On Apr 10, 8:35 am, Chris Schlaeger <cschlae...@gmail.com> wrote:
András Murányi
Chris,
I'll put together a step-by-step guide on how I got TJ3 to run on
Ubuntu and send it to you.
Regarding my question about the cash flow forecast P & L report: Is
that report available in TJ3? Can I help with anything to make it
available? It would really make TJ3 a fantastic project reporting
tool.
+1
I am actually using TJ3, but the cash-flow report is the thing I miss the most.
Andras
Chris Schlaeger
>> Regarding my question about the cash flow forecast P & L report: Is
>> that report available in TJ3? Can I help with anything to make it
>> available? It would really make TJ3 a fantastic project reporting
>> tool.
>
>
> +1
> I am actually using TJ3, but the cash-flow report is the thing I miss the
> most.
Agreed, account reports are missing. Adding them is not very
complicated, but I'm not sure when I have the time for this. But TJ3
has the 'cost' and 'revenue' columns which may help for some use
cases. Combined with the 'period' attributes for these columns, you
can emulate the old table, but only for tasks or resources, not
grouped by account.
Chris
Josef Dalcolmo
I too use TJ2 for the interactivity: We use TJ not only for scheduling
but also for costing (with our own back-end tools). The interactive
nature of TJ2 (both speed and convenience of finding the appropriate
place in the source) are saving a lot of time. I will certainly miss
this in TJ3. In addition, we use Latex to write our docs, so generating
a schedule in PDF is very useful.
You say you are not going to implement the GUI in TJ3. This is very
unfortunate. I also do not see any viable alternative for TJ2.
I must say, for a planning tool it is very bad, that it is being dropped
so quickly from the distros. We have projects that run over many years,
and I cannot simply switch to a different tool in the middle of a
project. I don't even dare to switch from TJ2 to TJ3 in the middle of a
project.
- Josef
Sanyi
try TJ3. I'm running Ubuntu. Can I install both TJ2 and TJ3 without
them bothering each other?
Tony Daly
Yes you can install both without any problems. I'm using both on
Ubuntu 10.4, 11.4 and TJ3 on Windows.
Tony
shiraz hashim
On Apr 15, 5:55 am, András Murányi <muran...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > [...]
>
> > Showing all the tasks for the whole project period would lead to a
> > very large html page leading to lots of scrolling. In the GUI I could
> > easily collapse the tasks I was not interested in.
>
> This could be easily achieved with JavaScript. An example that uses the
> jQuery framework:http://www.javascripttoolbox.com/jquery/#expandablerows
to do
this in taskjuggler. The reports files are generated by the
taskjuggler itself so won't it
override the changes ?
regards
Shiraz
András Murányi
Hi Shiraz,
I cannot give you a simple recipe as it would need more time to study the example and to boil it down to something portable. It seems, however, that the table itself doesn't need many modifications (if any), but the script has to be adapted so that it knows which row is which. Then the adapted script has to be added to the generated TJ output, or even better, to the TJ output templates. As for the templates, again I don't exactly now how they work - maybe Chris can shed some light on this...
As I have noticed, TJ output is not pure <table>s but <div>s play an important role - nevertheless, the script could be adapted for it.
I think the effort is worth if it actually gets accepted into the TJ distribution as an added feature. Unfortunately, I don't have the time now to work on this, but if anyone picks it up, I'll be there to help as much as I can.
Andras
Chris Schlaeger
> As I have noticed, TJ output is not pure <table>s but <div>s play an
> important role - nevertheless, the script could be adapted for it.
> I think the effort is worth if it actually gets accepted into the TJ
> distribution as an added feature. Unfortunately, I don't have the time now
> to work on this, but if anyone picks it up, I'll be there to help as much as
> I can.
Before you try to go this route, I'd suggest you look at a report with
included Gantt chart. You will notice that it consists of 2
independent structures that are kept in sync via fixed height
elements. Folding away some tasks would break the Gantt dependency
lines.
Chris
András Murányi
I took a look at the dep lines and they indeed look intimidating. Still, I think making up the logic that shrinks/enlarges them and eventually makes them disappear/appear will be no more complicated than the code that created them. Actually, if I think about, it shall be fairly less complicated. (If a line traverses invisible rows, shrink it, if it has an ending in an invisible row, make it disappear.) Identifying which fragments belong to one line (with a unique class name) could make the job easier. It's also necessary that each line has all of its horizontal fragments present as DIVs even if they are covered with another line's fragment. Just 2 cents, of course.