After all that fiddling with xplanner, we decided to use Agilefant (The Finnish Ferrari for backlog management!) instead. It requires JDK 1.6, Tomcat 5.5 and MySQL. I think it would work with PosgreSQL, but no database script was provided. It worked straight away (all we had to do was create the database and put the war file into the webapps directory) and seems to be under current development, which is 2 up on xplanner already! It seems quite new and I’m not sure that it has been widely adopted, so we’ll see how we get on.
Tools
Getting Xplanner working
Xplanner is a project planning and tracking tool for agile development teams, which we’ve been recommended to use at work. The only problem is, no-one seems to have done any work on it since 2006, and it only officially works in jdk 1.4, and some old version of Tomcat. Our server runs PostgreSQL 8, Tomcat 5.5 and jdk 1.6. One of the main problems we had was that the automatic migration process did not seem to work for Postgres. This is what I did to get it to work:
- Downloaded version 0.7b4. Amended xplanner-custom.properties to point to the postgres database. Used ant to install the database.
- Downloaded version 0.7b7. Followed installation instructions.
- Patched the database myself. The scripts are in WEB-INF\classes\patches. I had to amend them to work with Postgres (e.g. datetime -> timestamp, tinyint -> boolean). I only had to run the later ones.
- Deleted the patch scripts
- Deleted the file \WEB-INF\classes\com\technoetic\xplanner\upgrade\CleanUpNoteTableConstraints.class as it didn’t seem to like this either.
- Followed these instructions: http://espritlibre.org/2008/07/10/xplanner-spring-and-jdk-16/
And after all that, it seems to work, phew!