[rt-users] State of the Project

[Jesse]

It's probably about time for another state-of-the-project address.  There's
good news to report and there's bad news.  

	The good news is that RT2 is really taking shape.  As the product stands today, it has:

	*	A solid, scalable core.(On my desktop box, RT2 can create over 
		250 tickets a minute!)
	*	Clean, extensible interfaces
	*	A fast, easily modifiable template based web ui.
	*	A mailgateway that properly handles MIME encoded messages. 
	*	A functional commandline mode
	*  	The webui for ticket manipulators is about mostly functional. 
		(All the basic stuff works, but many of the more advanced 
		features aren't yet properly implemented.)

	Over the past several weeks, I've been hard at work cleaning up
a lot of the existing code base and implementing the foundations of the
ACL system and the new Groups system.

	Development is accelerating as we near the day when RT will be usable
in production.  As most of you know, I recently left my job at Into Networks
to start a non-profit and spend some more time working on RT.  I've probably
spent more time on RT in the last  two weeks than I had in the previous three
months.  It feels great to be able to put the energy somewhere I care about it
again!  

	Now that I've got more time, I've been looking back at what we 
proposed for a schedule a number of months ago.  We originally set ourselves an overly agressive deadline of June 30 for a 2.0 release.  There was never any illusion that we'd make it, but that date did help us pare down unneeded bells and whistles in the feature listing. 

	I'm hesitant to set a firm date for a production ready product, but
once ACLs and some basic administrative tools get put together, RT2 will be
ready for folks who are interested in starting to bang on it.  People who
are looking to start actually hacking on RT2 are probably already CVS updating
regularly.

	Generally though, things are coming together. The codebase is getting
cleaner, leaner and eaner. (Well, cleaner and leaner, anyway.)

	The bad news is that I've asked Tobias to leave the project.  I greatly
appreciate all the work he's put into RT over the past year or two. 
Unfortunately, Tobias seems to be under some pressure to "make it run now."
Sadly, this has led to situations in which code which was written to
"run today" rather than to be flexible, stable, and scalable.  I wish Tobias
luck with his project and look forward to trading features with it as it
approaches maturity.



	Jesse

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