eHour 0.8.3 is coming ! Well at least it’s in development but work is being done. 0.8.3 will be a minor release again meaning that no big features will be added but more smaller bug fixes. The following things will change:

• Assign all users to a project
  Currently you can only assign new users to a project by default but not assign all existing users to a project – this will be fixed.
• Migrate data from standalone to MySQL
  A small tool will be added that allows you to migrate data from standalone eHour to the MySQL driven version.
• Department filter on reports
  It is broken right now, will be fixed.
• Filtering of inactive assignments
  Inactive assignments clutter up the available screen space, option to filter them will be added.
• Wrong day displayed in per day comments
  The wrong day of the week is displayed in the per day comments pop up
• Improve Tomcat settings
  The datasource settings for Tomcat are not ideal which results in closed database connections after some inactivity. Better datasource settings and per Tomcat (5.5 and 6.0) version will be added.

No release date is yet known so stay tuned !

eHour 0.8 was scheduled for release at the end of March but unfortunately this is delayed until the first week of May, be patient !

You can however download a preview of the next standalone release here.
The changelog for this release so far:

eHour – 0.8
===========
Added French translation
Added Italian translation
Added Polish translation
Added Dutch translation
- 0000102: [Bug / defect] Fixed hour constraint not enforced (administrator) – resolved.
- 0000063: [Bug / defect] Can’t delete hours (administrator) – resolved.
- 0000065: [Bug / defect] Wrong week numbers (administrator) – resolved.
- 0000064: [Feature request] Change first day of the week to monday (administrator) – resolved.
- 0000100: [Feature request] Capability to change number of work hours in a day (administrator) – resolved.
- 0000098: [Bug / defect] Internal Error – after a long period of inactivity (administrator) – resolved.
- 0000095: [Feature request] autenticated smtp (administrator) – resolved.
- 0000086: [Bug / defect] Entering ` as hours in timesheet results in Internal Error (administrator) – resolved.
- 0000093: [Bug / defect] Clear button on report Page not working (administrator) – resolved.
- 0000045: [Bug / defect] PM role not properly removed (administrator) – resolved.
- 0000087: [Bug / defect] Reporting prints debug msg to standard out (administrator) – resolved.
- 0000091: [Bug / defect] eHour requires internet connectivity (administrator) – resolved.

eHour 0.7.3 is mainly an Internet Explorer and Java 5 compatibility release. When users of eHour use Internet Explorer it’s advised to upgrade to this version.

The fixed bugs in this release:

• Comments window not working in IE6/IE7
  The comments window is an inline popup using a ModalWindow. Because the comments window uses a separate form for the comment window this resulted in a nested form. Wicket solves this nicely by replacing the form tag with a div and doing a partial submit however this scenario only worked with Firefox; IE gave a Not Implemented javascript error.
  The fix is not really elegant and more of a workaround. An onChange javascript event was added to the textarea which updates the backing model. When the cancel button is clicked the model property is replaced with the original content while the submit and close button only close the window, no form submit is needed.
• XLS Export does not work with IE6/IE7
  There’s a bug in IE6/IE7 that prevents Excel downloads over HTTPS: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;812935
  The workaround was removing the no cache HTTP header for downloadable excels
• Dojo date picker slows down page build
  Although the Dojo date picker looks nice it slows down page loading because of the amount of javascript files it tries to pull in. Also it didn’t work properly under IE6. It’s now replaced by Wicket’s provided date picker (actually it’s Yahoo’s UI library: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/index.html). Less fancy but faster
• Page not working after using back button
  On some pages no check was done whether transient properties were properly initialized. When you use the browser’s back button the previous Page is deserialized from the Session but of course the transient properties remained null -> NullPointerException
• Detailed reports not working when eHour was upgraded
  Some fields were assumed to be not null while they could be null
• eh/projectManagement/ProjectManagement – 500 error.
  eHour was compiled and tested with Java 6. Unfortunately the String.isEmpty method was used which was added in Java 6. In java 5 this gave a NoSuchMethodException. The build server is now running Java 5 as well so stuff like this shouldn’t happen anymore.
• Hashed passwords are not salted properly
  As it says, the SHA1 passwords weren’t salted at all. An Acegi SaltSource was added so that new passwords will be salted now

Furthermore some minor stuff was done such as cutting down on the amount of jars the distribution contains. Dependencies such as commons-configuration and ddlutils pulled in a lot of unneccessary transitive stuff. This resulted in a 25% smaller download size.
Spring was upgraded to 2.5.1 and the full spring dependency was removed and replaced by the separate components.
The Maven assembly was fixed so the packages are built automatically again (in previous version this was a manual job). As a result all the jars in the standalone version moved to Jetty’s classpath rather than being in the web context classpath. Not really a problem since eHour uses an embedded Jetty so we’re sure there’s no other app running in the same container.

That’s it! The release is available from the standard download page: http://www.ehour.nl/download.phtml

eHour 0.7.2 is cooking up nicely. Although the 0.7.2 release was supposed to be a bugfix release some new features are getting in such as comments per project per day.
In previous releases a user can only add one comment per week, for all projects. As these comments do not appear in any reports they’re only useful for the users themselves.
With the upcoming release a user can enter separate comments per weekday, per project so (s)he can describe what was done in the booked hours. The comments will also be visible in the global reports so they can be used for detailed invoicing, etc.

Here’s how it looks so far, notice the small pencil icons:



Clicking on one of them brings up a popup where the comment can be entered:

The new release will be out end of December – first week of January.

Oh, the 1000th checkin into the SVN repository was made, yieha

Development of eHour 0.7.1 is finished and it will be released on Thursday or Friday. This is a bugfix release solving quite some annoyances such as fixing printing of a timesheet in the standalone version, better localization (currency and date format) etc. etc.. See the changelog at the end of this post.

After this release a second fix release is planned. eHour 0.7.2 is geared towards UI improvements and whatever defects show up in 0.7.1. The goal is to deliver this quite fast, before the end of the year.
When there’s some time left multiple user-to-project and project-to-user assignments will be added. For example, select a user and assign him/her to multiple projects in one go. The other path is to select a project and assign multiple users to it.

The 0.8 release is the first release which will have really new features. Which features aren’t planned yet, file your feature requests in the issue tracker.

Regarding the license, as you may know the license changed with the 0.7 release from GPL to a closed source license. I am reconsidering the closed source license and I may switch back to GPL (or any other appropriate open source license). If that’s the case I’ll be looking for experienced developers or UI designers who want to join the team (notice the ‘if’ though, not sure yet).

The change log for the 0.7.1 release:

eHour – 0.7.1
=============
- 0000025: [Bug / defect] Users with similar second name causes error in report charts
- 0000031: [Bug / defect] Submitting first week of month navigates back to last week of previous month
- 0000030: [Bug / defect] Clicking on first week/last week in navigation calendar selects wrong week
- 0000022: [Bug / defect] Print timesheet doesn’t work in standalone version
- 0000035: [Bug / defect] Database not shut down properly
- 0000021: [Bug / defect] Month overview: long project names
- 0000004: [Bug / defect] Assignment -> infinite date validation
- 0000024: [Bug / defect] Many labels under report graphs becomes unreadable
- 0000033: [Bug / defect] Choosing default project at “Add project” or “Edit project” function results in Internal Error
- 0000027: [Bug / defect] Cannot show turnover in Dollars
- 0000026: [Bug / defect] Cannot show dates as mm/dd/yyyy
- 0000023: [Bug / defect] Debug messages
- 0000032: [Bug / defect] Unable to open assignments for random user
- 0000007: [Bug / defect] 0 – 1 hours not stored
- 0000029: [Bug / defect] When hovering over Calendar no hand icon is shown
- 0000028: [Bug / defect] Clicking multiple times on next month results in internal error
- 0000020: [Bug / defect] Last week of 2007 switches to last week of 2006