Heylo everyone. I wanted to tell you about another tool for developers
I found a little while ago.
It's called /Factory/ (though stored in the database as "Project
Factory", possibly a previous name for the software). It's a
side-project written by a French developer named David Lambert.
/Factory/ is designed to track lots of data about projects, and is
written with teams of developers in mind, although I imagine it could be
useful to single developers as well. Some central concepts are
/Actors/, /Teams/, /Organizations/, /Locations/, /Schedules/, and (of
course) /Projects/. It's also capable of code generation, but this
feature is not yet an easily visible part of the program. According to
author David Lambert, at this point in its development, over 50% of
/Factory/'s code has been generated by Factory itself. Kinda cool. :)
I've tried the program and I think it's extremely well done, but could
stand several usability enhancements. Not so much in the realms of
unexpected behavior--it is reasonably predictable--but more in the sense
that I don't know what the hell I'm supposed to provide a lot of the
forms. For example, /Projects/ contain version-based /Plans/, which in
turn contain /Forecast/, /Status/, and /Tracking/ screens. I don't know
what the hell to do with these. Maybe it's because the author is
French; or because I'm a reasonably inexperienced programmer, since my
foundations are in webpages; or maybe it's something that just needs
more work.
Despite this fact, I think it nevertheless has a lot of potential in its
future--possibly including collaboration with /ArgoUML/--although I
don't believe either team is ready for this yet. When that time comes,
however, I think there's the possibility of some beautiful cooperation
between programs, if that's not overly-wishful thinking on my part. :)
(I actually wrote David Lambert and told him about /ArgoUML/. He says
it's a good thing to keep on the radar, but it's not on his short-term
list just yet. He did mention that he uses /Poseidon/, a commercial
tool based on /ArgoUML/. I tried /Poseidon/'s demo, and it basically
worked the same way with some shinier UI and one or two new ways of
working with designs.)
/Factory/ lives on SourceForge. The public site is here
<http://projectfactory.sourceforge.net>, and the developer's site is
here <http://sourceforge.net/projects/projectfactory/>.
I especially recommend checking out the "White Paper"and "Background"
pages of the public site. I found them interesting reads.
That's all for now. Thanks for reading!
-- Tony | "Zearin"
