GANTT charting tools

Engines, Libraries and Tools Tools Discussion
#1

MS Project is not part of Office, so few “ordinary” people have it. We’ve often needed project-management tools, and about a year ago I put together the basics of a GANTT-chart based PM tool. We shoved it on SF, and I and others contributed bits to it every now and then in a pretty haphazard fashion.

A year later, it’s actually quite good, enough so that I’ve dumped MS Project for most of my PM (nb: this free one has only got a tiny proportion of MSP’s features, but it’s free, java, much easier to use, and runs on low-spec PC’s, which solves a lot of probs I’ve had with MSP!).

I thought it might be of some use to people here; like UML tools, good free GANTT tools are pretty hard to come by but really useful. There are some really pretty Gnome ones (linux only IIRC?), and there’s at least one other for java that’s actively maintained, but we looked at the source and decided it was even more hacked-together than what we had already. We did chat to them about merging a while back, so that may actually happen at some point.

#2

That’s the first time I’d seen that one. I’d been doing a lot of expermenting with GanttProject which at least from a appearance perspective looks better :smiley:

#3

[quote]That’s the first time I’d seen that one. I’d been doing a lot of expermenting with GanttProject which at least from a appearance perspective looks better :smiley:
[/quote]
Yeah, GanttProject was the one we thought of merging with; they obviously had a far prettier GUI, and (at the time) easier to use, whereas our effort had all gone into backend data structures and special features (like zooming) etc. It’s paid off now with the ease with which we can add new features (the last time I looked at GP’s source it was … ahem … chaotic), and also the fact that we’ve completely re-done the GUI, yet had to make almost no changes at all to the data structures.

In particular, GP also has internationalized text, which is very nice for many people, but it does still have quite a poor UI. After the previous Ganttlet UI evolved into a horrible monster :slight_smile: over successive versions, the new version aims much more for being “totally intuitive yet extremely powerful” (but you’ll have to wait a while before all the features are implemented in the UI…).

(and if anyone has enough spare time, we could still merge with GP anyway, and hopefully end up with the best of both worlds?)