Show HN: Lavagna, an open-source issue/project management tool

by syjer • 11 years ago

19 25 11 years ago

stephenr2• 11 years ago

You lost me at Java

syjer10• 11 years ago

Not wanting to start a language war, but targeting the jvm give me a good level of confidence that it will work everywhere due to his good backward compatibility.

x5n1• 11 years ago

it also means you need your own vps or dedicated server to run that... and usually a pretty beefy one at that. that weeds 90% of your potential demographic out. you might as well as do a saas with something like this. if you want easy to deploy it should be easily deployable on a $5 digital ocean vps or heroku.

nahtnam• 11 years ago

Tbh you lost me at java as well...

kkirsche• 11 years ago

Looks cool and interesting. But it's Java so I won't be using it. While it may the right tool it's not something I can easily deploy with low to no overhead.

anonbanker• 11 years ago

like everyone else commenting, I despise java. However, I'm already using Trello, and this looks like a near full-replacement, so I'll suck up the extra ram usage and give it a try. thanks!

syjer10• 11 years ago

We are dogfooding the program on a small (free) openshift gear which provide only 512 mb of ram (and we have in the same "gear" a mysql instance).

It does not use _that_ much of ram. (And yes, it has a basic trello import functionality).

sigmaml• 11 years ago

Can those who 'lost' the post at Java describe what makes it 'lose' them? Curious.

Also, is the implication that the merit of the tool is decided based on your personal liking/disliking for the language it is implemented in? That seems childish! If you are responsible for any decent business, dangerous!

stephenr2• 11 years ago

Java applications from my experience are simply more hassle to deploy and maintain on Linux servers.

syjer10• 11 years ago

That's why I packaged the application in two way:

- a .war for deploying in a standard 3.0 servlet container

- a self contained executable war that has a embedded jetty http server

For the self contained option, you only need a working java 7 runtime. I don't think that I can do it simpler than that.

Additionally, if you prefer an even more automated way of updating the software, the application is available on maven central, so you could (as we are currently doing it in our openshift instance) use the maven jetty plugin and select the depedency.

I can't really think of a simpler deploy system. (except statically linked binary, obviously, but there you need to select the correct os :))

edit: we have a docker image for testing purpose too.

avitzurel• 11 years ago

I have a few comments on this one

1. It looks awesome in terms of UI 2. The webpage looks great and explains everything I wanted to know.

But when I looked at the source code and saw Java I was deeply disappointed.

I use Java a lot, MapReduce, Pig, Storm topologies, I love java but I would never use it on a server.

With every open source project adoption is super important, having Java on the server is a big ask when you want someone to try your project out.

One thing that will help a lot here is if you have a Dockerfile on your repo, this way people can build and deploy it easily. I'd even go as far as creation a chef recipe for it. Those can seem out of scope, but can help a lot.

Anyway, this seems like a solid piece of open source. Awesome

SitoCH• 11 years ago

Hi, thank you for your feedback, if you want you can find the Dockerfile here:

https://github.com/digitalfondue/lavagna-docker

As you see it's pretty easy to switch from this "demo" Dockerfile to another one that uses a linked MySQL container. This repo is linked directly to Docker Hub:

https://hub.docker.com/r/digitalfondue/lavagna/

syjer10• 11 years ago

Thanks for the feedback.

I admit that I still don't understand why java receive so much hate.

What kind of language would you prefer for a server side application and why?

For this project I've chosen java _because_ it's a boring language, I really don't want to be enabled to write clever code that will be unreadable after few months.

Additionally, with a jvm I've got extremely good libs/tools for developing the application, and when in production a whole heap of monitoring tools.

So uh, sorry for liking the jvm :(.

(And it's not that I know only java, far from it...)

edit: and still, I don't think that requiring a jvm runtime is asking too much. I mean, if you use a managed language, you will need a runtime.

Immortalin• 11 years ago

Have you considered Go? It makes deployment easier as it statically links everything.

BjoernKW• 11 years ago

Contrary to most of the others on this thread I appreciate you're using Java for this. Using Java means drawing upon a very robust foundation. This very much looks like a tool for business rather than personal use.

I can't imagine why a company wouldn't get a proper yet slightly more expensive server with an adequate amount of RAM instead of a vhost that only allows to run PHP, especially as the software itself comes for free and most companies such a tool would be useful for likely already have some sort of dedicated server - either on-prem or hosted - anyway.

Besides, Java often is the only option for deploying tools in larger companies.

I have one question, though: What's your business model with Lavagna? From what I've seen at a cursory glimpse there doesn't seem to be dual-licensing or anything similar (which on the other hand probably wouldn't make sense for a project management tool anyway).

syjer10• 11 years ago

Thank you for understanding the choice of the language :).

In fact we (3 of us) are all working in a "big" enterprise settings so we kinda know (and suffer sometimes) about the general constraints of deploying external software (it's more probable that a java or dotNet app will be accepted than something built with an exotic stack that require others additional software that nobody is able to operate internally).

Anyway, for running lavagna you don't need a big server, I'm running it on a small (free) 512mb of ram server from openshift _with_ a mysql instance in it! This is a 5usd/month instance at digitalocean.

What's your business model with Lavagna?

We are developing it in our spare time (I don't work full time so I can do projects like that), so nothing concrete at the moment, we are open for any opportunity.

zz12• 11 years ago

syjer10• 11 years ago

Thank you, kinda sad that Persona didn't get traction :(

zz12• 11 years ago

I wonder who is to blame: big players too interested in harvesting more data (clearly not thinking about Facebook and Google here), or lazy developers?

reeboblue• 11 years ago

Tried running on my Ubuntu 14.04 server and got the errors below (I have MySQL 5.5, java version 1.7.0_75 and have installed libmysql-java)...

./lavagna.sh: line 54: -Ddatasource.dialect=MYSQL: command not found ./lavagna.sh: line 55: -Ddatasource.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/lavagna: No such file or directory ./lavagna.sh: line 61: -Ddatasource.username=lavagnauser: command not found

syjer10• 11 years ago

I've answered in the github issue https://github.com/digitalfondue/lavagna/issues/10 :)

xfalcox• 11 years ago

This looks very good. I have been using OpenProject but my users doesn't like it so far.

Is i18n on the roadmap?

syjer10• 11 years ago

For the i18n, the basic pieces are already there. I'll provide a guide on how/what is needed to translate the application.

(Probably there are some issues in the gui for RTL languages and for CJK in the full text search support)

Show HN: Lavagna, an open-source issue/project management tool

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