is there a way to create a task/activity report (say a weekly report) off tasks managed with Mylyn? I've been using Rachota TimeTracker which allows me to create reports (in html format)
http://rachota.sourceforge.net/en/demo.html
I've just started using mylyn (our company uses Embarcadero JBuilder which is is based on Eclipse), but I don't see anywhere in the Eclipse or Embarcadero docs about reporting capabilities.
Is it possible? Is it possible to query activities worked on a prior week and report statistics out of it (management like reports, you know;) I'm sure it is, but I haven't been able to google it out.
Thanks.
You're in luck, Tasktop Pro (the supported version of Mylyn) has reporting. It allows you to:
View all task activity times for the previous day, week, and month
Manually adjust times as necessary to account for meetings and discussions
Submit your adjusted times, on tasks you select, to your task repository
Create reports in various formats
I'd recommend this short video which explains the reporting features in about 6 minutes.
David Shepherd
Tasktop Technologies
As you already know by now, the reporting functionality is included into commercial Tasktop product, which is developed by the same people who created Mylyn. So, obviously they are not interested to include some features into a free version. Now you have two options, either buy Tasktop, or develop your own extension for Mylyn. The task data is stored in reasonable simple xml file, so you not necessarily have to create an Eclipse plugin.
the reporting feature was stripped from the project when it used to be called mylar, in 2007, and since the project went commercial never came back to the open source mylyn for obvious reasons..
I found this simple perl script which outputs a pretty basic text only report, good enough for me.
http://rachaelandtom.info/mylyn-report
No takers? Not surprised since I can't find anything on the subject. For what's worth, there is an experimental task/activity report available for Mylyn with the sandbox jar. However, I could not get mine to work as I'm tied up with a JBuilder installation behind a firewall (and I can't download anything on the corp network that is not pre-evaluated... it sucks, I know.)
I'm going to have to experiment with the mylyn sandox at home, but it would be great if someone knows of an easier, more stable alternative.
Related
Very little has changed in a while for BIRT. Since the project seems still heavily used, it would be interesting to know if there are future plans and if so, what is entailed in those plans. Subsequently, based on the development status: Is BIRT still a safe platform to base development on or is it expected to just be conserved in the current state such that occuring bugs probably won't get fixed?
We decided to use BIRT instead of Jasper 8 years ago.
We are still using 4.2.1 for development and 4.3.0 for production runtime.
I reported several bugs since then and only very few of them got fixed.
Furthermore, I developed some patches to enhance the word emitter output - with no reaction from any one at all.
I also developed a patch to allow kind of a vertical tab (to place something at a fix y position on the page (but not in the page footer). With my previous experience of the community, I did not publish that one.
I can say that while the source code is quite easy to read, it is nevertheless almost impossible to understand what is actually going on, because the functions are extremely deeply nested.
My conclusion with 8 years experience of using BIRT for production:
PROS:
BIRT is very powerful and flexible, you can achieve some very cool results.
The quality of the resulting PDFs.
There are only very few things I miss and cannot work around.
The runtime engine is very stable and fast enough, very few problems.
The community is helpful.
CONS:
From an open-source perspective, it is one of the weakest projects I know of.
New versions tend to introduce more bugs than they fix.
Bugs, ideas and patches from the community seem to be ignored most of the time.
Lack of internal code quality and documentation.
Update Dec 2021:
BIRT is back again!
The open source project is quite busy (see answer by Alexander Fedorov) and every help is welcome.
It looks like there will be a new release soon.
Until then, building BIRT yourself (with Eclipse 2021-09 and Java 11) has become quite easy thanks to the common effort of the community.
Metadata and information about the health of an Eclipse project can be found on projects.eclipse.org:
The Birt project is still alive, but not as active as before:
there has been only one release per year since 2016 and
in the last three months there have been more than 20 commits from 11 contributors.
Like all open source projects, the success of the project depends on participation. Therefore, I encourage everybody to report bugs and propose changes to Birt and other open source projects.
Update: Good news, Eclipse Birt has been rebooted. It is under active development again, there have been more than 100 commits in two and a half months and the release 4.9.0 is scheduled for March 16, 2022.
The Eclipse BIRT project has been restarted recently, and we are working to prepare Eclipse BIRT 4.9 release.
Contributors are very welcome. Here is the brief instruction regarding steps how to join this effort: https://eclipse.github.io/birt-website/docs/community
Latest versions of BIRT are not available in maven.
TortoiseCVS comes with bundled CVSNT binaries.
The older version(s) came with CVSNT 2.5.03, which turned out to have a security vulnerability.
The latest version (1.12.5) comes with CVSNT 2.5.05 that has several issues:
It nags with pop-ups that urge you to buy the commercial version.
It inserts advertisements into commit notes.
It has a bug that leaves Windows command-line consoles in a messed-up state.
The sources (GPL) are not easily obtainable.
Some references:
- What is going on with CVSNT?
- Batch scripts no longer work?
Recently, somebody posted this to the TortoiseCVS mailing list:
i found the sources and made the following fixes
version_fu.h - set the "suite" flag to avoid popups and advertisement
win32.cpp - saved the original codepage and restored it on exit
take it from http://www.mediafire.com/?ys93oh4bdj1auby
only the cvsnt.dll needs to be compiled
I downloaded the sources and tried compiling them. Unfortunately they seem to need quite a number of other packages (openssl, iconv, mysql, postgres, etc... I lost count) that are open source but still need to be hunted for...
Combined with my limited time and the lack of tools (I don't have VS2008) I gave up on the effort to build it myself.
I tried contacting the author of the message, but he is in a similar position (and does not use CVSNT anymore).
Contacting the TortoiseVCS maintainer also proved fruitless:
That is not a project I am going to undertake.
TortoiseCVS is very low on my list of priorities these days.
If anybody is willing to build the "fixed" CVSNT.DLL from the provided sources, and make it available, I would greatly appreciate it!
Thanks,
Alex.
Sure - you can get it here - compiled in a single installer which includes TortoiseCVS and the latest CVSNT code with lots of bug fixes:
http://march-hare.com/cvsnt/features/tortoise/
The small fee we charge is to cover our costs of developing and distributing the software including the license fees for MSDN and financial contributions to related projects such as the TortoiseCVS project, Bugzilla project, FSF etc. etc. The source code is included in the price.
Remember that Free Software is about Freedom (like the Free Press) not about price:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
In a Java project I'm working (alongside a team of 8 devs), we have a large backlog of features that lack automated tests. We are covering this backlog and we need to keep track of who wrote a JUnit test and when, plus we have to measure how many test we wrote as a team in a week/month/semester (as you may have figured out already, this information is for management purposes). We figured we'd do this by marking the tests with the information we need (author, creation date) and let Eclipse do the processing work, showing us tests we wrote, who wrote'em and how far we were from reaching our goals. How would you smart people go about this? What plugins would you use?
I tried to use Eclipse Custom Tags for this, but it's not the purpose of the feature, and the results I got were kind of brittle. I created a TEST tag that was supposed to mark a test method. It looks like this: (date is mm-dd-yyyy)
//TEST my.name 08-06-2011
Since Eclipse processes tag description by substringing (contains/doesn't contain), it's, as I said, very brittle. I can timestamp the tag, but it's just a string. Eclipse can't process it as a date, compare dates, filter by date interval, stuff like that.
I searched for plugins, but no dice.
My B-plan is to create an Annotation with the information we need and process our test packages using Eclipse Annotation Processing Tool. I haven't tried anything on this front yet, though, just an idea. Anyone knows a good plugin for this kind of Annotation processing? Or any starter tips for dealing with Eclipse APT.
Thanks a bunch, folks
I would not use Eclipse for this.
Your team should be checking the tests into a version control system such as Subversion, Git, Team Foundation Server, etc. From there it should a fairly straightforward matter to determine the owner and check-in time. You can and should do this sort of metrics calculation during every build. Better yet, be sure that your build script actually runs your tests and uses a tool like EMMA to instrument the code and determine the actual coverage.
As a fallback for measuring coverage, if you choose a naming convention then you may even be able to correlate the test classes by file name back to the feature under test.
Many modern build systems, such as CruiseControl, have integration for doing these sorts of things quite nicely.
I am a long time intellij user.
The company where I work is likely to introduce Rational Team Concert to our department shortly. I went to the RTC demo and it looks like a reasonable product, built around Eclipse, but I would rather not give up using IntelliJ.
Does anyone have experience of using non-eclipse IDEs with RTC?
This is going to be hard - you could configure IntelliJ to call the RTC scm commands, but this is not going to be that easy. I have heard of a company planning to build an integration, but not seen this myself (they might have finished this already). Company is called CM-Logic and is UK-based.
I use both of them together. You can't use IDEA to checking or deliver code, but you can certainly edit code in IDEA and then use the RTC tools to checkin.
One warning: I'm on Ubuntu 64-bit, and everything is fine. I have a co-worker using IDEA & RTC on Windows 7 and he has to close IDEA every time he wants to check-in because IDEA has file locks that RTC balks at.
I have no knowledge of the CM Logic's JazzConnect-IDEA product. There doesn't seem to be any way to download a demo of it either.
Rational Team Concert's integration page says "Jazz Connect for IntelliJ IDEA enables developers using JetBrains to leverage the power of Rational Team Concert for source control, work item management, and collaboration services."
Also have a look at this page for other integrations of RTC.
I would say that it could, it looks like IntelliJ offers an version control integration point as does the Jazz SCM component, but I am not familiar enough with IntelliJ to say for sure(looks like ClearCase is already on the list so they are adding support for vendors), I would think that without a full fledged integration where your Work Items are integrated into your development RTC starts to loose it's flair but may be not for your management :)
It seems that the answer is no.
Coexistence could cover many aspects; source code repository, Task lists, builds etc. But the first step would be integrating with source code repository and RTC uses something called Jazz.
There seems to be no available plugin nor plans for such.
Update on this: A new feature for Intellij is in the works, and planned or release this year. Here is the internal RFE. The links tab has a video recording of RTC integration with IDEA.
https://jazz.net/jazz/web/projects/Rational%20Team%20Concert#action=com.ibm.team.workitem.viewWorkItem&id=358932&tab=com.ibm.team.workitem.tab.links (Jazz ID authentication required)
What is the best version control system to implement with PowerBuilder 11.5?
If you have examples of how you have did branching/trunk/tags that would be awesome. We have tried to wrap our heads around it a few times and always run into problems because we use shared libraries such as PFC/PFE in multiple applications.
Right now we are only using PBNative, and it sucks.
The Agent SVN is a MS-SCCI Subversion plug-in works with PowerBuilder.
Here is a link that describes how to setup Agent SVN to work with PowerBuilder and Subversion.
We currently use Perforce and it's P4SCC plugin, which works very well. In fact, I'm sure I read somewhere that the guys at Sybase who write PowerBuilder, actually use Perforce themselves.
So, to be fair, let's start out by saying that while you're asking about version control, PBNative is source control. If you compare something that is intended to have more features than just keep two developers from editing the same piece of source, then yes, PBNative will suck. The Madone SL may be an incredible bicycle, but if you're trying to take a couple of laps around an Indy track, it will suck.
"Best" is a pretty subjective word. There are lots of features available in version control and configuration management tools. You can get tons of features, but you'll pay through the nose. StarTeam has some nice features like being able to trace a client change request or bug report all the way through to the changed code, and being able to link in a customized diff tool (which is particularly useful in PB). Then again, if cost is your key criteria rather than features, there are lots of free options that will get the job done. As long as the tool supports the Microsoft SCC interface, you should be OK.
There is a relatively active NNTP newsgroup that focuses on source control with PowerBuilder, which you can also access via the web. You can probably find some already-posted opinions there.
Many years ago I used Starteam to control PB applications. PowerBuilder needless to say is an outdated bear, and it has to export each and every object from its "libraries" into source control.
Currently our legacy PB apps have its libraries saved whole into Subversion, without any support for diff's etc.
We use Visual SourceSafe. We don't use PFC, but we do have libraries that are shared among several projects. Till now, each project was developed separately from the others, and so the shared libraries were duplicated. To have them synchronized, they were all shared at the VSS level. Lately we've reorganized our sources so all projects are near each other, and there's only one instance of the shared libraries.
VSS is definitively not the best source control system, to say the least, but it integrates into PB without the need of any bridges. PB has an inherent problem working with source control, so it probably won't make a very difference working with one instead of the other (at least from the PB point of view).
Now, on a personal note, I'd like to say PB 11.5 is a piece of sh*t. It constantly crashes, full of unbelievable UI nuisance and just brings productivity to its knees. It's probably the worst IDE ever created. Stay away if possible.
FYI: The new PB12 (PB.NET) will integrate with SCC systems so you can easily choose which source control system that you want to use. Since we basically have dropped PBLs (they are now directories) files can be checked in/out individually - even with a plain vanilla editor since files are now normal (unicode) text files.
StarTeam integrates so beautifully with the PB IDE. I used that combination at my previous company (PB9 and ST5.x) for several years. You should be managing your code at the object level - don't log the entire PBL into ST...
If you're having problems with that setup, hit me up offline. phoran at sybase dot com.
We use Merant Version Manager for older projects and TFS for newer work. The only issue we have is that TFS does not support keyword expansion and changing the 'read the flowerbox comments' attitude people have. Some folks are nervous about losing the inline versioning history.
We use StarTeam and have been very pleased with it. It combines bug tracking with version control. Unfortunately though we don't store our files on the object level. We just store the PBL files directly in source control. Anything that supports the SCC interface theoretically should work correctly in PowerBuilder.
PB9: We used PVCS but had stability problems with pbl corruption and also problems co-existing with later versions of Crystal Reports (dll conflict) so now we use PB9 with Dynamsoft's Source Anywhere Standalone. This system is more primitive; it is missing the more advanced features for promotion levels and for pulling out an older milestone version of all objects to make a patch build.
What we are looking for now is something which will allow more advanced "change management", to support promotion levels at the change level (rather than at the object level). Would it be better to use perforce, starteam, or (harvest change manager + HarPB), or something else? Any advice on these combinations would be greatly appreciated.
You can always use Plastic SCM with PowerBuilder through SCC. Plastic is pretty advanced in terms of graphics, tools, replica and so on, so it's always a good choice to keep in mind.