Kevin did a great job presenting SimpleTicket at BarCampDallas. Woot! The source code has been released, now the real work begins - with the community (that hopefully) will be formed around the tool.
What is SimpleTicket? Think simple, easy to use trouble ticket system freely distributed via the GPL license written using Ruby on Rails with Ajaxian goodness.
I just finished going through the workflow with Kevin and I am very excited to say it works. There are a few tweaks required, but it works. We will be able to test in production all week, demo on Saturday (BarCampDallas) and release that night. There are going to be some missing parts:
The tweaks? First, there are a few auto-populate features that are necessary to make the software easy to use. Next, we need to streamline the ‘take ticket’ workflow to remove a step (i.e. deliver you to the update screen immediately). Finally, we need windows to close after an action is taken on them, right now the previews stay open after actions are completed. Anyway, congrats to Kevin - bang up job before the ‘end of the day.’
According to Kevin when he goes home. According to Scott and me? 11:59PM. When will Kevin release the internal version of SimpleTicket? He claims before the end of the day - whose day? Your guess is as good as mine. We are waiting with baited breath…
Information Week magazine conducted a survey that indicates that American companies and government organizations are saving millions with open source software. More than 87% of American companies use open source technology. 42% of companies use open source content management solutions. 33% of companies use open source database technologies. 16% of companies use open source customer relationship managment technologies.
So what does all this mean? The popularity of open source software is increasing around the world, but for many different reasons. European companies seem to value the flexibility of open source solutions, while American companies value the savings. Many companies are using open source software on proprietary operating systems, but the Linux adoption rate is definitely expanding. Finally, the results show that user demand for customizable software does exist, despite the claims of proprietary software vendors.
Lots of people develop in lots of different ways, and I’ve found none less varied than the methods used by those who develop in Rails. Most Rails developers write on their local machines, with local implementations of Ruby, Rails, Gems, MySQL/PGSQL/YourFlavorRDBMSHere, and WEBBrick. I was cajoled and poked and prodded into using this methodology lately, instead of my normal methods.
In fact, I was kvetching on a list recently about how much I enjoyed and hated using TextMate to develop in, and wished it had SFTP support so I could work like I normally do… Development instance up on my server, source on my server, editing tools local. Most of the people on the list reminded me that good developers wreck their own computers first, servers second (after releases and stuff).
So, I moved to the Mini that I use to code on (and for my everyday desktop). Wow. Talk about S-L-O-W. I mean, Wow. I was reminded of coding in Pascal in High School on my NEC V20 based PC. We are talking 1985 binary sort slow. Wow.
I persevered, pushing on, coding against my own PC. Update javascript, press F5 - dah-dum-dah-dum-dah-dah… check email… hmm hmm HMMM hmm hmm… test code.
I have moved back to coding with Dreamweaver against my server. Its not in production yet, and ligHTTPD is sooo much faster. Maybe I am too ‘Instant Gratification Generation’ ( give it to me now, give it to me now! ).
What do you code in, readers? How do you setup your development environment?