Finally it is up & running! Our GanttProto demo application is up on appspot.com. My goal was to see how such a complex visual control can be done in the browser after one developer told me that it was impossible :-) I did have a suspicion that it is doable, based on my experience with the Calendar control, but you never know… :-) At the same token it is also a good test-case for our PMAP Grid control (coming in another announcement soon).

Read on for technical details…

This is a prototype of a fully interactive (i.e. editable) Gantt (project) diagram created entirely with HTML & DOM, without any plugins/Canvas/VML/SVG whatsoever. We use only a minimum set of graphics (e.g. the project milestone diamond is one graphic image).

The client side was developed with Morfik, and we used Morfik M2 Beta 2.0.2.1 to create the browser application. It is hosted on Google App Engine, so the server side is written in Python (at the moment not much there:-). BTW since most of the code is independent from the Morfik Framework (does direct DOM manipulation), it is an easy port to straight JavaScript or to other toolkits, so let me know if you are interested…

Morfik M2 worked pretty well (it is a beauty), I needed it badly to create a client-only (or “Express”) version of the demo, so that I can host it on Google App Engine. Porting the code from the 1.x branch was pretty straightforward, even some issues have been fixed in the framework, although I still had to (re-)apply some of my patches :-) I did not use the fabulous effects library yet, as it does not work with IE in the current beta. Google App Engine was a snap to use - kudos to Shah Besharati for the integration sample! BTW I ended up using Komodo Edit 4.3 (free) for the GAE work - pretty neat.

Right now the Gantt is not really functional, all you can do is resizing columns, resizing the left/right side, expanding/collapsing WBS nodes, dragging and re-sizing task bars (without much effect on task data:-) and scrolling around (Alt+mouse scroll wheel will scroll horizontally). You can also switch between two visual themes. We will add more functionality later.

You can play with it freely, will not write anything back to the server. It is running on a high availability server, so I’m interested if you will have any issues.

In the next couple of weeks I’ll be working on the smarts behind the scenes to make it really functional. I’m open to ideas how to make it really useful, especially in a Web 2.0 way, so please keep the comments coming!

More later…