I've made the source to ClockingIT available at the wiki and am looking for a few developers who'd like to help clean up a bit and make a nice and easy release for hosting on ones own servers.
I'll still provide the hosted solution, but some people feel safer hosting something like this themselves, so getting an installable release out the door would be quite nice.
Feel free to grab the source and see if you're able to get it running yourself.
Would it be possible to install this on Windows with InstantRails? or Ruby once click installer and xampp? I have been considering a number of project management and wiki apps and have had a look at Basecamp, Activecollab among others and think this is coming out quite good. I think you have done a great job on this. Pretty interface and very functional app. I would definitely prefer Clockingit to Basecamp or Activecollab. People should hear about this more. Really impressive for a 2 person team.
Actually, I have no idea. I do use a few gems (RedCloth, eventmachine, RMagick, json, ferret, fastercsv) and if those are available, I don't see why it shouldn't work. Feel free to try and let me know what problems you run into and I'll try and help you work around them. I should probably attempt a windows install myself, but I haven't rebooted my machine for a few months and I dread doing it. Something always breaks. :-)
I'd love for more people to find us, but I always feel I should add one more feature or fix one more problem before I make any big announcements so it never happens.
I just tried to install this on windows and ran into some Ruby gem issues. The InstantRails package provides mysql and apache with zero configuration to ease ruby apps deployment, and some demo web apps that one can deploy, it provides an easy way to add the CIT folder (followed your instructions in the readme for configuration) but deploying it results in errors.
The problem is InstantRails doesn't have all the extensions and you need to use the gem utility to get those. Unless you have a development environment with MS VC some of these like json, ferret, fastcsv won't compile and binary extensions for windows are not available. Others like RedCloth, RMagick, eventmachine do have binaries for windows and install ok. So I tried the Ruby one click installer for windows hoping it would have these precompiled but no go.
So I guess its best to try this on Linux for the time being, or install ms vc which I don't have. Apparently you can use Mingw but thats a road to intense complexity and a huge time gobbler to configure and use.
Installled VC++ and the windows platform sdk but compiling the gems like json, ferret etc fails with tons of errors. Perhaps best to stick with Linux for the time being.
There is a precompiled ferret 10.9 for win32 at http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/13454/ferret-0.10.9-mswin32.gem which supposedly is compatible with the current version API wise, but it's a bit buggy. JSON is only used by the push server, so disabling that might let your run ClockingIT at least.
According to the Ferret website VC6 is suggested for compiling under windows, is that the version of VC++ that Microsoft released for free ages ago?
I'm pretty sure it's possible to remove the json requirement with a bit of rewriting, I'll see if I can get something working for windows as well but it'll take a while as don't have much windows experience.
Actually, there's a json encoder in ruby located at ./vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/json/encoders/core.rb - maybe that can be used instead of the native gem encoder.
The windows platform sdk is huge at 500mb, I think the ruby gem extensions as far as windows is concerned are a bit messy at the moment, and there doesn't seem to be sufficient help or discussion at the popular ruby sites about this issue, there should be an easier way to get them installed without fiddling around with compilers and such. My intention was not to distract you with this, I will try this on Linux for the time being.
Bleh, it's a decoder we need for the push server, not an encoder. And that was added to activesupport two weeks ago at http://dev.rubyonrails.org/browser/trunk/activesupport/lib/active_support/json/decoding.rb?rev=6443
Looks like that can be used for json in the push server, though.
I have made some progress in Ubuntu Edgy but have come unstuck at the last step. I am running edgy as host on xp with vmware. I installed lamp and ruby rails and followed your readme. The gems compile without error. The database sets up without errors. I configured the database.yml with the mysql password and username but didn't touch other 2 config files, just renamed them. The push_server starts on 443 and the webrick server starts without error serving on port 0.0.0.0.3000. Now when I point my browser at the account creation page it works and I can create a user and domain but when I try to log in to the domain the browser just sits there and I can't access the htttp://subdomain.clockingit.com:3000. Any ideas.
Did you remember to override subdomain.clockingit.com in /etc/hosts or the windows equivalent if you're browsing from there? Does the attempted request show up in the webbrick log? You might have to do a 'touch log/development.log; chmod 0666 log/development.log'.
ok, sorry about this, really stupid configuration error on my part, forgot to change the hosts file, everything working as it should, followed your instructions in the readme to the t. recommend others trying the install to do the same. Thanks.
Are you still looking for developers? I really like your product and would like to help out with it. I don't have any Ruby or Rails experience, but I am learning as I work with your product. I looked at the wiki and didn't see anything in regards to what you would like developers to do or the format in which you want developers to code, comment, and submit fixes. I have a little time here and there and would love to help out where you need it. Let me know what you wish developers to work on (particularly me).
I did see the Roadmap, but again nothing in regards to where you need help.
Thanks and looking forward to working with you, Ryan
Any help is appreciated, so feel free to email me at admin@clockingit.com and we'll see if I can't get you started on something relatively easy. I'm assuming you have Darcs installed, and access to a Unix machine for development?
I've successfully been able to deploy ClockingIT on my MacBookPro as part of my own learning ROR learning process (my experience has been with ASP.NET/C# for the bulk of my professional work). My development machine is a MacBook Pro running VMWare Fusion, WinXP & Visual Studio 2005 (soon 2008) --- most of our clients are corporate and typically with windows based infrastructures, hence the business reason for developing for Windows. I'm still working on deployment using InstantRails since we have a few IIS servers available and it would be nice to use our existing infrastructure. Getting close though...
I've been wanting to add Ruby on Rails development as a feature for some clients that don't have corporate budgets and want to host on either Linux or OSX for whatever reason. Plus the ROR environment provides a good contrast to the GUI heavy ASP.NET development environment for certain projects --- each have their place... So I was ecstatic to discover ClockingIT and even more so to find that Erlend graciously made the source code available --- I've always found it most effective to learn by example and ClockingIT is definitely a great one...
We currently host our working ClockingIT installation on a shared server at hostingrails.com. The biggest challenge I've found is getting the right hosting support for the environment --- it's been a challenge. The support team @ hostingrails.com are very helpful and got me going quickly, but I still have not been able to take full advantage of all features such as the push server and email task updates. Plus I have issues with it being a shared host and having to deal with traffic and availability issues at times...
So, my long term plan is to set up an in-house Linux or OSX server that I can completely control, or to have it running via InstantRails or some other method on one of our existing IIS servers.
All that said, I'd like help where I can since it will also help me gain more practical and useful experience with ROR and ClockingIT. I've used Basecamp, Intervals and evaluated several other online project management services and ClockingIT surpasses most of them for sheer functionality. So I'd definitely like to see it continue to develop..
Although ClockingIT is rather large, I'm pretty sure people should be able to join in and do something, even though it'll take a while before one is comfortable enough to do major changes. There's a lot of old cruft, for instance, which can be cleaned out without much more knowledge than how to use grep. There's also quite a few strings which need adding to the language files, and I'm sure we can find other simple things to do which will increase your understanding of how things work.
If you want to help out, grab the source from Darcs (or email me for Git information if that's more interesting) and I'll try and come up with a list of small and easy changes which should be relatively easy to handle.
