Plandora project was born to be a tool to help the software development process, from the customer requirement until the task conclusion, and consequently gather the "history" of project. The Plandora system can be useful for teams that have problems with resource bottle-necks, parallel projects, critical dead lines, necessity for scope documentation of tasks and requirements, etc. Let's consider in short its main features:
Multiples roles
- Project Leader, Project Resource, Customer and System Administrator (Root). Each role is associated with different features into system.
Customer GUI
- The system provides customer GUI to open Requirements and follow the status of opened Requirements.
Custom Reports
- Based to JasperReports and iReport.
Resource TO DO list
- The task working time from the resource TO DO list, can be updated and will be considered dynamically by the Gantt chart and eventually will change the status of request viewed by customer requester.
Management
- Cost, invoice, resource capacity, risk, survey, KPI and artifact management.
Gadgets
- The main form could contain gadgets that can be selected by user in order to improve his task or management.
Meta Fields
- The tool implements the concept of Meta Fields. A Meta Field is a visual element (text box, combo box, calendar or a SQL combo box) created by system administrator and can be related with requirements, tasks or risks of a specific project. The Meta Fields is useful to give more customization from the inputs.
Multiplatform
- The Plandora tool is multiplatform. It is written in Java and runs in any operational system that supports the Java language.
Multiuser and multiproject
- Allows a hierarchy structure of projects.
Repository browsing
- Integrated with SVN or a local DB repository.
It's time to deploy this great application to the cloud and start using it.
Create environment
1. Go to jelastic.com and sign up if you haven't done it yet or log in with your Jelastic credentials by clicking the Sign In link on the page.
2. Ask Jelastic to create a new environment.
3. Choose the instances you want to use (for example, Tomcat 6 application server and MySQL database), set the cloudlet limit and type the name of the environment. Then click Create.
In a minute your environment with Tomcat and MySQL will be created.
Upload Java package
1. Go to Plandora.org and download the latest Plandora release zip package.
2. Extract files from zip package you have just downloaded.
3. Switch back to Jelastic dashboard and upload Plandora Java WAR package to the Deployment manager.
4. Once the package is in Jelastic, deploy it to the environment you have created earlier.
Configure database
1. Click Open in browser button for MySQL.
2. While you were creating the environment, Jelastic sent you the email with credentials to the database. Create an account and the database with the application using these credentials.
3. In order to complete the process create the Plandora tables and insert some basic data using mysql.sql script (you can find it in the zip package you have downloaded earlier).
Configure Plandora
1. Click config button for Tomcat.
2. Navigate to the contex.xml file (server directory) and edit it according to your database settings (use the example file that comes with the installation package).
3. Save the changes and restart Tomcat.
Start Plandora
1. Navigate to http://plandora.your_hoster's_domain/do/login?operation=prepareLogin. You'll see the login form of Plandora. Use the login root without password to create new users and projects.
There are some users for testing. All of them have no password. You can remove or change them if you want.
Have nice projects!
Plandora is a wonderful tool in Java to help the software development process. Just give it a try!
Jelastic can natively run any Java application with no code changes required so the procedure above is applicable to most Java applications.
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