[UPHPU] web-based project management software

[Matt Hildebrand]

| SimplyPM [1] seemed to be the answer, but then I read deeper and 
| discovered that it was developed for IE and only runs on MS servers 
| and requires Active X. What a piece of junk! Why developers choose to

| develop software so dependent on and limited to proprietary 
| technologies is completely beyond me.

Wade,

I'd like a chance to respond to that statement :) First off, let me
start by saying that I've been lurking for over a year on this mailing
list, and have learned lots of wonderful things. I've been working for
the past two years in QA and one of the things that we had to do
recently was to roll our own (http://opentcdb.org) test management
solution (because the $10k+ one that we purchased wasn't working and we
needed something that would). We decided to open source the product for
various reasons, but also decided to code it in C# for ASP.Net against
MSSQL.

Every member of the team that has been working on this project is quite
the open source advocate, but because this had to be developed fast and
just work, we decided to use those proprietary technologies because it
would give us the most bang for our hour. Because of those proprietary
technologies, we're able to do things that we would be unable to do
using a completely open source back end (PHP, Perl, MySQL, PostgreSQL,
etc.).

Now, if we were just a group of people doing this on our own, we
probably would have done something else, but because of the situation
that we were in, the MS technologies were the best fit for what we
needed. Don't get me wrong--I'm not a MS appologist. I do, however, feel
that there is a place for proprietary technologies like these to be
used. If we want that to change, the open source technologies will have
to be able to compete better with them and provide the same level of
development tools that the proprietary solutions provide. (Have you ever
used the SQL Server Management Studio? It's wonderfuly better than
anything available for MySQL or PostgreSQL. And don't even get me
started on development IDEs and debugging tools for MS technologies vs.
those for PHP.)

Anyway, the end result is that a smart developer uses the correct tool
for the job at hand. If the project that I'm working on fits better into
the LAMP camp, then that's what I develop it for. If it works better
with MS technologies, then that's what I use. No sense using a saw as a
hammer ;)

Well, I hope that I haven't offended anyone by my tirade here. And on a
side note, we're using streberPM for our project management (PHP/MySQL,
in case you were wondering). It's still pretty young and simple, but it
works quite well for what we need.

--Matthew