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Enterprise Architect is very nice, since you can do forward and reverse software engineering with it.

However, if you do not have the budget allocated for it, a good compromise is StarUML,
which became very nice and usable lately and has the same "feeling" and menu-driven approach
like the old Rational Rose and Enterprise Architect:

http://staruml.sourceforge.net/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/staruml/files/staruml/5.0/staruml-5.0-with-cm.exe/download

As for Rational Rose, the first original version was very good with some known quirks until it
became IBM Rational Rose and was converted into a "super Eclipse" plug-in.

So, if you enjoyed drawing UML diagrams in the old Rational Rose,
then Enterprise Architect and StarUML are the tools that you are looking for.

And if you do not like to draw with a mouse then Graphviz Dot and a good text editor is for you:
http://www.graphviz.org/Download.php

For tracking issues / documents and schedule,
I can recommend either BugZilla, Mantis or BaseCamp:

http://www.bugzilla.org/download/

http://www.mantisbt.org/

http://basecamphq.com/

As for the actual writing part, your company should already have a good set of Word Templates,
to document the actual Sofware Requirement and Specification (SRS), Sofware Design Document (SDD),
Change Request Document (CRD).

Once, you got those set up, then we mostly use MantisBT or BaseCamp to share, comment and track them.

As for producing code documentation, the choice are: Doxygen, JavaDoc, NDoc, JsDoc:

http://www.doxygen.org/

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/documentation/index-jsp-135444.html

http://ndoc.sourceforge.net/

I've never heard that Rails would make "programmers obsolete", in fact it seems to be the opposite; if you look at the official Rails site you'll notice that the biggest tag-line is "optimized for developer happiness".

Rails makes developers happier, not unemployed. What's more, anyone can write bad code in any language, so pointing to Twitter is hardly a conclusive argument. There are lots of big Rails sites out there, including Basecamp, the original Rails application.

For a better (and longer) write up on scaling Rails, I refer you to this article.

unfuddle.com - it has everything you could ask for, a free version that allows up to ten users, a SVN repository, task creation, project creation, whiteboards, messaging system and milestone. One of my clients turned me on to it since it is what they used previously. Prior to that we always used Basecamp which excels in the communication but is a little light on task milestone leveraging.

I use redmine, which is opensource, and free as long as you have a server for it.

If I liked bazaar, I would use launchpad.

If I wanted a payed, supported option, I'd go for Basecamp.

http://www.basecamphq.com/

Basecamp has been the only thing ever that made me not hate doing PM. http://basecamphq.com/

For timetracking/project management.

letsfreckle.com
myquire.com
GetHarvest.com
BasecampHQ.com
tasktic.com
Tickspot.com
AtTask.com
paymo.biz
rememberthemilk.com
zoho.com
nozbe.com
www.tenrox.com
whodo.es
clockingit.com
activecollab.com
project2manage.com

http://www.basecamphq.com/

http://www.37signals.com/

You can add members to Basecamp, send messages / announcements to members, create overall tasks and assign tasks to individual members, etc. I think this system would work much better than the existing email based system

Rails is fine if you want to do another Basecamp or similar 37signals-type project. It's even better if you want to whip out an amazing number of structurally identical, common-organization Hype 2.0 apps. But just ask the folks at Twitter how well its database access scales to meet demand - it almost put them out of business. Several times. Rails is a poster child for the perils of an application-specific language being used as a general-purpose one.

A lot of things that I read obout it remind me of Python in the early days - but I don't recall Guido van Rossum being so Great Leader-ish, and there's also the difference that Python actually can be used for an amazing range of applications. Ruby can too; it's a beautiful language - until you cut its balls off with Rails.

Jive, SugarCRM, and Novell are all companies that are built around products that are open source. While 37Signals has released an application framework as open source, their applications, like Backpack, Basecamp, and Highrise are not open source. 37Signals is a great company with really good products, but I don't think they are the sort of company that Ballmer was referring to.

You make far too many assumptions.

That that url doesn't work only shows that either expose_php is off, or that the page isn't powered by PHP. Allegedly it did work at the time of that blog posting, and given that every single other 37 Signals website is powered by PHP, it seems pretty plausible that rubyonrails.com also uses PHP. Regardless, I don't particularly care either way about that point.

You attacked the original poster's method, saying that it would give false positives, which it clearly does not. I pointed out the flaw in your argument, and you assumed that that somehow meant that I agreed with the original poster, which I do not (I don't disagree either, however).

I'm not defending anything, I'm merely pointing out the blatantly wrong.

Try out Basecamp. It's pretty straightforward, and it's more than a cheap wrapper around a database. The views are well thought out, just the right amount of AJAX to make your day go easier, and good collaboration support. Start off free and pay if you need more than the free account provides. It doesn't get very expensive. If that's not your thing, put down another recommendation for trac.

Err... In case it wasn't common knowledge, 37signals is largely responsible for the development of Ruby on Rails. As such, I'm pretty sure it powers all of their apps, like Ta-da List, Basecamp, and Highrise. I think Highrise is pretty new, but Basecamp has been around for a while, and I think it qualifies as proven.

It's hard to believe you "get around on the Web 2.0" and yet haven't heard of 37signals or any of their products; perhaps you just don't remember hearing of them. Jason Fried, the founder (a co-founder?) of 37signals, gave the keynote at our campus webmaster forum this year. I'm pretty sure most of us knew who he was. (I could be wrong!)

All that said, I've tried RoR and not liked it. It's on my list of things to play with again the next time I have some free cycles. :)

I'm assuming, as the previous responder did, that you mean "a site using Rails" when you say "a site that's on Rails", as opposed to a site about Rails. The obvious sites here are the 37signals sites, the ones that were the impetus for the development of RoR by David Heinemeier Hansson the first place. Basecamp, a project management tool, was their first and Highrise is their most recent. There are more of their sites listed on the Wikipedia page as well.

Another Rails site that's been in the headlines recently is Twitter

If you're looking for a good place to start, Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas and DHH is probably the best book out there.

http://basecamphq.com/

It's a lightweight project management app with ultra-simple time tracking, built-in. I use that to collect timesheet data, and I have a custom app for downloading the data and munging it further. It's VERY simple, which is what I like.

Might not be what you need but for my needs, very nice.

No worthwhile RoR web apps? Check out BackPack, BaseCamp, or TaDa List. Finally, RoR can do anything that PHP can do from blog engines to a photo gallery to web stores. So to say that Ruby on Rails can't create any worthwhile websites shows a lack of knowledge of the abilities that Ruby on Rails has.

So, you're saying that if I spend a year of my free time creating a fantasy game,

Quite a few actually - you've probably just never heard of them:

• BlinkSale invoicing (which I actually pay for)
• BaseCamp and half a dozen other 37signals services.
• Zimbra webmail
• Zazzle
• Tons more that i'm not linking to...

It sounds like what you're really looking for is a project management solution. Assigning tasks (such as 'write a story about x', 'cover the situation in y for the next 2 weeks'), settings deadlines, and co-ordinating groups or individuals - this all has very little to do with 'content management' as most people think about it.

Drupal has you covered with organising your content (taxonomy), tracking history and versioning, and establishing an editorial workflow (actions and workflow). But it doesn't have project management well covered (the 'project module' is too specific to software development), and there are no Drupal modules that I'm aware of, for integrating such management with actual content handling.

I think that Basecamp would do the job best for you. It has all these PM facilities, in a very intuitive and easy interface.

Sounds like you need a content management system, not just a database. Your users basically seem to wish for a way to share project-related materials. I see you've already considered that...

We have tried Sharepoint with some success but that is pretty limited too

...so I'd definitely be interested to hear what limitations you ran into there. It's highly possible that some of the open CMS systems (Drupal, etc) could offer you what Sharepoint doesn't, but it's hard to say without knowing exactly what parts of Sharepoint you found limiting for your needs.

You might also consider a hosted collaboration tool such as Basecamp. I haven't used it myself but it has quite a few fans. It's probably more limited (and certainly less extensible) than software like Drupal but the ease of administration (since it's hosted) and easy accessibility (since it's not on your LAN, it's on the 'net) could compensate. Then again, if you're the IT guy... perhaps you don't want a zero-administation solution for job security's sake. :)

Writeboard is simple and free. http://www.writeboard.com/ Then if needed Basecamp could be used to organize it. http://www.basecamphq.com/

I've been using basecamp http://www.basecamphq.com/ as a lightweight solution, and I really like it so far. I'm not sure about scaling it up to a large corporate level, but it has been great so far for my small team. The downside is all of your data is on their servers.

It uses a Software as a service model, pay as you go. So not GPL, but it does expose a HTTP/XML API that could easily be hacked with perl, python, etc.

The company http://www.37signals.com/ also offers a few other solutions. You may have heard of them through all of the RoR hype lately.

Winston Churchill once said "Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." You could say the same thing about email as a collaboration tool -- it sucks, but for the average user it sucks less than every other option.

• IM? Most IM clients don't log messages by default, so things can't be easily searched or retrieved unless you know to turn on logging (assuming your client even allows that).
• Wikis? Each wiki has its own arcane markup syntax, and the average user has better things to do than learn them.
• Intranets? Somebody's gotta post stuff to the Intranet, or nobody will use it... and nobody wants to post stuff to an Intranet that nobody is using.
• Web calendars? Slooooow.
• Project management software? Using tools like Microsoft Project successfully requires a level of discipline and expertise that is beyond most people.
• And none of the specialized services that have evolved to fill this niche (Basecamp, for example) have a mental model that's as easy to grasp as e-mail.

None of these objections are so large that they can't be overcome; many people use the tools above successfully. But for the average user, who accepts defaults and isn't interested in learning a new skill just to organize a meeting, they all have flaws that outweigh the flaws of e-mail.

I hate collaboration-by-email as much as the next guy, but until we can come up with something that is an order of magnitude better for the average user right out of the box, we shouldn't be surprised if they keep shooting e-mails around. (sigh)

That's what I thought at first, but I think they mean service as in something you rent out for private use. For example: http://www.basecamphq.com/ , a web based project management thingy. AFAIK, you can't buy Basecamp and install your own copy. Basecamp exists solely as a service that you pay to use. The application that your bank offers is not quite the same thing because you're not using it for private purposes. You're using it to interact with the bank only.

-matthew

Where are OpenOffice's collaboration features which rival the office system?

Over Here. Basecamp for project management, with all of the features you're talking about, plus Writeboards for versioned documents, plus Campfire for real-time chat if you must.

Whatever mojo Office does, it had better be something better than what you're talking about, because that shit is easy.

Ruby on Rails is actually a generalized/modularized version of the production code used by 37signals, authors of Basecamp. That's how it came to be. Their developer, David Heinemeier Hansson, chose Ruby as their primary development language (gutsy, I have no idea why). As a course of building all of their products, he abstracted the framework he created and released it to the public as Ruby on Rails.

(apologies on any inaccuracies on the story. this is how i understand it, corrections welcome)

i think basecamp is what you want

Users tend to like Web 2.0 apps. A friend of mine showed me his company's Basecamp setup and I was blown away. He had over 30 employees and outside vendors working on about a dozen different projects, and all of it was managed in Basecamp. For $100/month, he is able to keep much better track of everything than in the past, when he relied on Entourage and a variety of other apps to pull it all together. He has people using Windows, he has people using Macs. He has a slim IT department. His people actually enjoy using Backpack, which also makes his job easier, because he doesn't have to cajole them all the time.

The best of the Web 2.0 apps have a transformative effect for users not because of any technological revolution, but because the apps feel much more like client-side apps. They operate smoothly and feel more fluid. Scoffing at this is akin to saying that user interface improvements are not very important, which is odd coming from someone like Zeldman. Even subtle changes in how an app works at the user end can make a huge difference in how the user feels about the app. The very fact that people refer to Web 2.0 products as apps rather than sites shows this. Sure, dynamic websites have always really been applications. It's just that to most users, they didn't feel that way. Now, because of new coding approaches, the apps feel like apps.

Is this an epic revolution? No. But it is the start of something new, in that a host of small companies with far less startup funding than in the Dot Com era are starting to pop up. They're trying different things. Many of them are trying the same things in slightly different ways. Most of them will not last very long. But this time, the money situation is different. Web 2.0 isn't about huge VC money and absurdly valued IPOs. It's about real businesses following established business practices. Figure out how to make something that people want to use. Figure out how to make money doing it. Go do it.

I can understand why Zeldman is wary of the hype, but just because the VCs are jumping on the bandwagon doesn't mean that Web 2.0 is pure hype. To me it is invigorating to check out my TechCrunch feed and see so many interesting web applications popping up. The future has not yet been commoditized. As a whole, the web development community has learned a great deal about what works and what doesn't, not just from a technology perspective, but from a business persepective. In my opinion, Web 2.0 is much more about applying those lessons than about the breathless hyperbole of VCs. It really is different from the Dot Com era.

Trolling, but you find a more conciliatory tone towards the end for whatever reason, though I think you may be misunderstanding the use case for Rails.

Firstly, I've used basecamp for my projects for a few months now, and despite their many many users I've never appreciated any problems with its perfromance. As well, the rails main site never seems to get slashdotted when it gets linked. IMHO it's too early for anybody to say what scale rails can work on, we have not yet seen the triple-digit-blade load-balanced rails application (which the framework does support, theoretically).

Secondly, rails for a developer like me has been fantastic because I have zero formal CS education, and for years I have been making "a couple of internal projects" in things like FoxPro, Paradox, 4th Dimension and Filemaker Pro -- these are the real targets of Ruby on Rails. There are alot of functions in any company that might be automated through a web application -- simple billing and invoices, job tickets, things that were specific to their business -- and now they can just do it, without having to buy anything, and it'll work on the web.

I work in film sound, and I've been writing a web app for ADR, a process that has alot of special data requirements and has untiil very recently been done on paper, or in filemaker databases, or in some god-awful dongled 4th Dimension app some guy wrote and wants $600 for. I able to do it in my free time (when I'm not submitting to /.). There's a huge demand for small web apps that do what filemaker and it kin have been taking care of up until now.

While I don't concede that rails can't power a 1000-hit-per-second website, I don't believe that's what all the exitement is about, either. I would never go back to filemaker, and frankly if you're good at FMP and you can write HTML, you can code rails.

I use basecamp for my project management. It has a simple and fast time entry feature with CSV export.

On the corner of my desktop I have a little stopwatch program called Watch It (actually I'm still using v0.5, I just realized). Nothing particular special about it, you could probably find a different one that you like.

When I start some work, I start the stopwatch, and when I stop working? RIGHT, YOU GUESSED IT! :-)

Sure, I often forget, and have to check my shell history or whatever to come up with an estimate (I'm a unix consultant) but over the years I've gotten good at remembering.

I enter the time into the appropriate project and task in Basecamp, and then each month I use a Perl script to download the CSV from Basecamp and import into my ancient (as in, pre-web!) time tracking app and take it from there.

If I'm not near a web browser, I just scribble the time in a special green sheet (green == MONEY) in my hipster PDA and then enter it in basecamp later (don't do this often though, best thing is to enter the time ASAP or it becomes a chore).

You could probably use a spreadsheet or something instead of basecamp or a dedicated time-tracking app (but I really recommend basecamp, it's super-simple and responsive via Ajax goodness). Or you could use a real physical stopwatch instead of a computer program. Etc.

There is a free trial, so there is no reason not to kick the tires on this.

This happens over and over and over again— with some users, I'm afraid to upgrade their software because their "world" sadly depends on the cargo cult execution of gestures to get their work done. Too many applications change how they look and feel with every upgrade that many users go off the rails whenever that happens. At least with an application, you can kind of avoid it, but when it's Windows— aw man, why not just fix the SECURITY HOLES instead of changing the UI? Please, Microsoft?

Screw it [sic; I'm being polite.], I'll keep my Mac OS X for clients and Gentoo Linux for servers and any web service that doesn't suck (Gmail, Basecamp, etc.), thank you very much.

Microsoft's days are over the moment Google decides to market an operating system that includes GFS for redundant data-storage and their MapReduce for batch processing. These things are big contributors to how its even possible for Google to exist. Simplicity trumps mediocrity.

I use basecamp for exactly this purpose. VERY simple and easy to use. Some call it the "ipod of project management". Very affordable too.

It has messages, comments (like a blog), milestones (calendar), general-purpose to-do lists, "writeboards" (which are basically one-page wikis), file upload (supply your own FTP server), and time tracking. Also, RSS feeds to track progress. I love it because it's so SIMPLE>

Throw in a subversion repository and you're set.

Who told you RoR doesn't scale? Take a look at http://basecamphq.com/ and http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.ruby.rail s/24863 . Basecamp is being "used by tens of thousands of people in over 40 countries!" . And it doesn't scale? C'mon, java-boy. All we know that 90% of projects doesn't need to be done in Java. Actually, if you need a *really* huge web-application, java isn't your choice too. Examples? Amazon, eBay, Google...

Well I haven't seen any company claim credit for it, so...
So 37signals isn't a company? Rails was extracted from Basecamp and open-sourced.

So, all the arguments about RoR being untested are untrue as well because 37s is making quite enough money off products built on Rails.

http://www.basecamphq.com/

--Robert

I'm a sysadmin keeping tabs on about 20 projects with varying levels of activity and these are the tools I use the most.

#1 Index cards are a no-brainer. Just take a stack of those and a pen and you've got the perfect PDA for meetings, notetaking, or brainstorming while taking a dump. Add a small clip and you've got the "hipster PDA" that all the cool kids are talking about. Google for it. Nothing beats paper and pen for free-form input. A lot of the hipster folks are printing custom templates on their index cards which is an upgrade I haven't tried yet. As is using different colored cards for different projects. Don't knock it 'till you've tried it. I have a Zaurus but only for SSH, it's useless for note-taking.

#2 Basecamp.. I'm surprised nobody's mentioned basecamp yet. It's basically a very simple (very "mac"-like and easy to use) message board with todo lists and milestones. I can't live without it!! For instance I have to-do templates where each item is a machine name. When I need to do upgrades, I just create a milestone in the calendar, and attach the to-do list and check them off. If somebody needs to know the status, they can just log in and check. And it integrates well with iCal and RSS (you *ARE* using RSS for keeping tabs on your machines and other low-priority stuff already, aren't you?).

#3 finally OmniOutliner, the best outliner in the world. I use this for all the brainstorming, note-taking, to-do lsits, whatever, that are too complex for the first two. You can even write full manuals in it, it's got as much formatting power as a word processor. It's great for numbered paragraphs and subparagraphs for instance. I can't live with this either. Did I mention it was fully scriptable as well?

Other handy tools are OmniGraffle (create flowcharts, etc) and email (mail yourself to-do items) but those three above are indespensible to me.

Been playing around with it for a while now, there's a fair few sites using it

• Strongspace a secure online file storage/sharing area
• BackpackIT a personal and small business information manager
• Basecamp a project and task management site

Plus the (small) site I'm working on for a friend Slap My Belly

Anyone have a real-world example of Rails scaling to a large project and lots of traffic?

While theres no sites i know off with massive traffic that run rails, theres a few large projects. TextDrive run StrongSpace which is basiclly online storage using SFTP and RoR. Also theres a few from the creators of RoR, BaseCamp, BackPack...

An alpha framework? I'm not sure that an alpha framework is responsible for so many great apps IN OPERATION. Basecamp [www.basecamphq.com] services 10K+ customers, if I recall correctly. Don't be fooled by its 1.0 status. I've seen many 1.0 apps with less behind them than Rails.

Rails was originally extrapolated from a Web application called BaseCamp, a project management system written in Ruby. From what I understand, this framework was considered to make Ruby a lot more efficient to develop Web applications.. thereby putting it "on rails", as it were.

A blog is a web site. Slashdot is a blog. I use a "blog" to communicate with my clients. Most of the sites in my RSS reader are "blogs". If I want to help somebody set up a "home page" today, I just send them to blogger.com or a similar service.

If you don't like the term "blog", just call it a web site. Okay? Maybe we can avoid these pointless "blogs are democracy / blogs suck" articles.

I am sure that someone else has needed this level of detail and control, and has this problem already solved. Any help would be appreciated.

Well, you seem like you probably wouldn't be convinced otherwise, but I've personally decided all that "micromanagement" stuff like "priority", "status", and "dependencies" is just useless and counter-productive.

It just gives you the illusion that you've somehow taken the whirlwind of stuff everybody needs to do and "captured" in the computer. And therefore "controlled".

Then when your team doesn't update the progress, doesn't pay attention to the priorities, etc., etc., you decide that either 1) your team sucks or 2) your tool sucks. But the whole idea of computer-based project management sucks, that's the problem.

I don't have quite the same situation as you (I have maybe 20 projects, 5 active at a time, teams no larger than 10), but I've settled on basecamp. It's really just a glorified bulletin board. I agree with the creators: project management is just a communications issue, nothing else.

With basecamp you can post messages and receive messages. You can create milestones with dates and responsible parties. There's no hierarchy, no gant charts, no fluff. Just a place for everybody to communicate.

You might want to check it out....

I'm just saying that Ruby in its current state can't really handle complex web-applications.

By saying "Ruby doesn't have ____" and being shown to be wrong? Heh.

As for being able to handle complex web apps, depends on your definition, I suppose. I'd certainly consider things like Basecamp to be a "complex web app," but perhaps Java lets sites like that remotely read your mind using ESP or something else nifty.

These gantt charts and complex packages never work. They just give you the illusion of control! They make you think that if you stuff all your data into the computer, somehow your project will guide itself.

That just ain't how it works.

I could give you a big lecture here, but here's all you need to know as a project manager: how to say "NO".

Once you master that, projects suddenly start meeting deadlines.

Personally the most complicated software package I use is basecamp, which is basically a bulletin board with milestones.

To name just a few really busy rails driven sites:

http://www.basecamphq.com/ Tens or thousands of users

http://www.backpackit.com/ Thousands of users

http://www.43things.com/ Big enough for Amazon to care

This is of couse ignoring all the private rails apps used internally by some pretty decent sized companies.

Rails scales amazingly well on lighttpd with fcgi Apache with fcgi does a pretty good job as well.
You can run it on Linux, FreeBSD, Windows Server 2003 and just about any other respected(I use the term loosely with WS2003 on the list) server operating system.

• Backpack
• TaDa Lists
• BaseCamp

I absolustly adore Basecamp, which is a hosted project management system.

It's mantra is "communication", so it's centered around posts and messages. But you can also set milestones and check off to-do's.

It's really super-simple and flexible for different purposes. It's like the "Mac" of project management. Two fields to create a new project. One field to create a client. Three or four fields to add a new person on your team. Compare that with some other groupware or PM systems that have screenfuls of crap you have to fill out and complicated workflows that you just give up on after a week.

It doesn't exactly handle your PocketPC (though they just added a mobile interface to their other project, backpackit.com, so they might add it to basecamp.. they are very open to user suggestions).

And then offline thing doesn't seem like a big deal... just use text files and then upload/send them when get online?? However the basecamp folks ARE planning on letting you use email to create and respond messages someday, so that's another plus. You could just compose your messages on the train and then send them in.

But do check out basecamp.

Go to the site, click "Try Basecamp Free" and set up a free account. The external stuff is PHP, probably for legacy reasons.

Basecamp itself is 100% ruby-on-rails, and it's easy to verify once you enter the webapp.

• BaseCamp
• SnowDevil