For a three years now, one of my favorite IT tools on my bat-belt has been RT
from Best Practical
. RT (Request Tracker) is just another bug/incident tracker, but it's got a lot of great features like seamless email integration, highly customized access control, a self-service web site, and the ability to make public replies and private comments on any ticket in the system (allowing you to keep the shop talk as technical as you need to record solutions while only giving the end-user an overview of the solution).
I noticed in the last couple months that Best Practical has created a new service web site called Hiveminder
, which is basically just a to do list manager. However, as to do list managers go, it's pretty nice. I've been using it for a week now just to see how I like it. The jury is still out on that one.
Of course, I'm never satisfied with just seeing a service, I wanted to know how it worked. I initially thought that Best Practical might have adapted their RT to handle to do lists (which wouldn't be very hard) and added some nice JavaScript front-end enhancements. That is not, however, what they did. They've been building a web development framework called Jifty
on which Hiveminder is built. This isn't really news, but it was news to me so I added it to my list of things to look into when I had the time.
This weekend I decided to finally install it and give it a shot. So far it's wowed my socks off. Before this web site became just another part of my blog, I was working on a web framework. So far, Jifty is the web framework I would have written if I'd really had the time and experience to make it happen. I'm building a very small image gallery application to see if I can get something more to my liking than anything I can fid that's already written. I'd say that after a few hours (thoroughly interrupted by feedings and calming a 1 week old) I'm well on my way to something very nice.
If you're familiar with DBIx::SearchBuilder
(used extensively by RT and, I believe, written for it) or with the internals of RT, Jifty will look familiar as well. They've reused a lot of similar ideas. For example, Jifty::DBI
is the database development framework, which is pretty much a rewrite of DBIx::SearchBuilder with a lot of the functionality that RT extended it with and an extensible new way of writing database schemas. Jifty itself does almost everything for you automatically and then you can choose which parts of the built in functionality to override. It provides some nice tools for making your site look really nice and have that all-in-one-page-Ajax-feel.
Anyway, I'm pretty excited to see what I can do with it. If I successfully put together the image gallery application, you can look forward to seeing it here sometime during the next month.
Cheers.
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