Dear community,

Sooner or later, we will start a complete rewrite of Agilefant. This won't happen until the release of the version where iterations and projects can hold stories from many products.

But in preparation for this, we'd like to raise discussion regarding the technical side of a rewrite!

What do you think; should the rewriting of Agilefant start when you are reading this, with what technologies should it be done, and why so?

Hi Jarno,
I think better to rewriting Agilefant on GRAILS framework. I felt that we may be able to deliver new version quick to the market and since it is based on Groovy and Java move will contribute to the development as well as it may easier to refactor when necessary.

BR
Senaka

Thanks for the comment!

As far as we can tell, the rewrite will start in the Summer of 2012 at the earliest - however, it may also start much later. More comments are welcome!

How about PHP?

I guess that's also an option. Why do you think it would be suitable?

Hi Jarno, I've been using Agilefant in my org since September of last year. I just wanted to chime in and say that the current product is great and I don't see why a complete rewrite is necessary.

The install was much easier than any of the other Agile frameworks I tried to install. It's probably because we have a lot more experience setting up Java based web servers, but still, the number of steps to install was significantly less than the others.

Glad to hear your positive comments! If you haven't registered your organization, we'd be happy if you did that:
http://tinyurl.com/agilefant-registration-2011
(don't worry about the wrong year number in the URL)

As for your comment, a "complete rewrite" is not by any means necessary now - but at some point in the future (supposed that Agilefant lives for 10-30 years, for example), it probably will be. This was more of a speculative thread, so don't worry :-)

I'd rather have new features than a complete re-write.

The app desperately needs some permission settings. It seems that everybody is an admin in the current version and I'm hesitant to open it up to our entire IT department, let alone to the business without proper authentication. There's nothing stopping any user from changing a project they are not working on either intentionally or accidentally.

It would be nice if there were a little more configuration available too, for example the states available don't mean a lot to our organization.

That said, if you were to re-write in a different technology, I'd recommend python + django. Second choice would be Rails.

We are working on the permission settings. Hard to say how far we will get, the current plan is to make it possible to publish iterations as read-only, and then we'll decide what's next.

Making the states configurable can probably be done quite easily.

Anyhow, while rewrite isn't imminent right now, thank you for your input!