Ganttzilla Beta is Released!

I am very proud to announce the beta release of Ganttzilla, online project plan documents viewer with versioning, sharing and publishing capability. Our team has been working hard last 3 months to create user friendly and reliable web solution to view MPP, MPX, XML and Planner project plans.

Well, what's interesting about the project? First of all, the idea. There are situations in our professional career when IT project plan needs to be submitted to higher management for discussion and approval, but people who are interested in viewing it cannot open the document since they do not have desktop software with corresponding capability. In this case Ganttzilla may help. You simply create document in Ganttzilla workspace, upload the document file and view the Gantt! Each document has several versions, so if you upload new document file under the same document it is treated as new version of this document and called document revision. Each document revision has its own sharing and publishing settings. Sharing is a secure way to share document version - invitations for viewing are sent to users explicitly specified by document author. All collaborators may post comments. Publishing differs from sharing in the way how the security is being applied: published document may be viewed by any user of the Internet by navigating to document version URL.

Ganttzilla supports viewing of Microsoft Project 98, 2000, 2003 and 2007 formats and also Planner files.

Technically, Ganttzilla is built on top of Grails framework. We are the developers with Java background and found Grails and Groovy to be mature for the project like this one. The bad thing about Grails is that several bugs we've identified were severe enough and made us spend some time to find a resolution or a workaround for the problem, but on the other hand we are very pleased with development productivity that Grails give us and we will eventually stay with Grails for Ganttzilla and will choose it for our future projects.

It would be much harder to implement Ganttzilla without MPXJ library which provides capability for reading and writing Microsoft Project and Planner files. MySQL is used as database management system. Jetty is our development and production application server. On the client side we stick to jQuery.

What's coming up next? Well, we are going to make preparations for Professional account support in Ganttzilla and look forward to implement export of project Gantt into image files soon. Stay tuned!