News

This is the second beta release of version 0.9.3. The main focus of this release is improved compatibility of the new features with Qt version 4.3 and earlier. A custom print preview dialog was added which uses either standard Qt components available since version 4.4 or custom components when the standard ones are not available. In addition the look of reports with Qt versions before 4.4 was significantly improved.

I also made a few improvements related to the installation. I added a simple man page, originally written by Patrick Matthäi and extended by me. The generated makefiles now have support for DESTDIR, which makes creating packages easier, and the installation path of the manual was changed.

This is most likely the last beta release for this version. In October, when I return from my vacations, I'm planning to clean up the code a little bit (fix compilation warnings, update API documentation, etc.), maybe also extending the reporting engine a little bit, and publish a release candidate version.

The first beta release of version 0.9.3 of the WebIssues Client is available. It adds support for secure connections using the HTTPS protocol (it requires OpenSSL support enabled in the Qt libraries). It also has a simple reporting module allowing to print and export reports in CSV, HTML and PDF formats, containing a tale or list of issues in a folder or details of a single issue. Note that this is an early preview of these features; they are not guaranteed to be fully functional; they also have no documentation yet. Feedback is most welcome as usual.

In addition, I refactored various parts of the code during the past few months so that they could be reused in other applications. The articles describing these reusable components are available on my website. I also relicensed the components to a BSD-style license so that they can be freely used in both open source and commercial projects.

It's recommended to use Qt framework 4.4 with this version of WebIssues. It will work with earlier versions, but print preview won't be available and the printed reports may not look very well because of limitations of the HTML rendering engine. If you use an older version of Qt, you can save the report to an HTML file and print it using Firefox or another browser. I will try to improve compatibility with Qt 4.3 in the future releases.

Just like I promised, I'm returning to developing WebIssues. At the moment I'm extracting reusable components from the WebIssues Client code and writing documentation and demo applications for them. They are available in the Articles section of my website. One is already published and a few more will be added soon. I will also partially update the WebIssues Wiki.

The roadmap for stage 4 of development is more or less complete. I'm planning to release two versions of the client and one version of the sever, preceded by some beta releases, within the next six months. Most of the new features will be client-side improvements, except the email notifications. For now there will be no significant changes to the database or the protocol.

One more thing - the WebIssues Client participates in the second edition of the Qt Centre Programming Contest and I hope that it will be an opportunity to gain some publicity in the open source community. The contest will end on September 30th. Keep your fingers crossed :).

The hotfix release 0.8.3-2 resolves a problem with the mysqli engine when a non-standard port number or socket path is used to connect to the MySQL database. The problem was reported yesterday on the WebIssues Forums. It doesn't affect configurations where another database engine is used or where MySQL uses the default port.

Note that when applying the hotfix to version 0.8.3 or 0.8.3-1, there is no need to update the database. Just unpack the package to an appropriate folder on the server. For new installations or when upgrading from older versions, follow the instructions in the manual.

After four months of development, three beta versions and one release candidate, the first stable version of the WebIssues Desktop Client is now officially released. The third stage of development is considered complete and in the nearest future there will be no new releases (except for bugfix releases if needed). But please keep posting ideas and suggestions, because I'm planning to return to developing WebIssues by the end of this year - the best is yet to come :).

The main new feature of this release is the so called 'folder watches' which allow to display summary information about total, new and modified issues matching given filter criteria is selected folders. In addition new and modified issues are marked with a colored dot icon. This makes tracking changes and collaboration significantly easier.

Other features are: importing and exporting client settings associated with a server, proxy support for Internet connections, new improved UI style on Windows (similar to Office 2003) and a lot of other visual and functional improvements. The program was more thoroughly tested and many bugs were fixed in order to reach the stable phase of development. In addition, Spanish, Russian and Polish translations were created - many thanks to the translators :). Finally, the project switched to qmake as build tool for simplicity and now supports MS Visual C++ on Windows.