We had an excellent time in January with eight students and a professor from Calvin College, U.S.A (http://www.calvin.edu/) who came to the OM offices in Carlisle (England) to work on OpenPetra. During their two-week inter-term overseas experience they were assigned to several projects. The students got to know quite a few aspects of the OpenPetra development and created very useful functionality.

For several weeks a major focus of our team was preparing for the visit of the students and so everyone was excited to actually start working together with them on the various projects. It was amazing to see how quickly the students picked up their tasks and how eager they were to contribute to the project. After a brief introduction and just a few days of working on the projects they produced a remarkable output: in the end they created ten Personnel Data Screens, four new Extract screens, did research on single source publishing for user guides and application help and created Unit Tests that automate the testing of user privileges on screens. That result proves that it is rather easy for developers to start working with OpenPetra’s technical setup and architecture and that new developers can contribute to the project to a certain extent without having had extensive training beforehand.

Other work on OpenPetra:

• WolfgangB created a framework for the creation of Extracts, after initial work from TimotheusP. He is currently working on refining the Extracts framework which includes filtering by address fields, saving of settings, etc. The decision has been taken to incorporate the Extract screens into the Reporting area to reduce double effort and improve usability.
• ChristianK is in the process of further improving the Data Validation framework, automating source code generation so programmers need to write less program code for data validation, among other notable improvements.
• Tim Ingham has continued work towards the completion of the functionality of the Accounts Payable system. Among other improvements the reversing of a payment is now working.
• ChristopherT has worked on the Budget sub-system of the Finance Module. He is now working on Phase 2 of the International Clearing House sub-system of the Finance Module.
• AlanP continued to work on Maintain Table screens and lately worked on more advanced ones (Local Data Label screens). He also did an update to the OpenPetra Developer’s Assistant this month, improving its functionality.
• Since there was interest in the forum and on private email for testing the Linux Client of OpenPetra, TimotheusP fixed the build for the Linux Client, and it is now again working on Linux. The fix will be part of the next release (0.2.18). You might want to have a look at this Forum post if this topic is of interest to you.
• The gift receipts for the Nazareth Charity have been printed by TimotheusP for the third year running. Work is underway to move the whole bookkeeping of that charity into OpenPetra.
• Two core developers of OpenPetra, TimotheusP and WolfgangB, are attending the ICCM Europe conference in the Netherlands (8 – 11 February, 2012).
• We have put updated screenshots of OpenPetra on our website to reflect the current state of the program (you can have a look at them here).
• We are looking forward to an evaluation phase in March where we want to review the whole project, have a closer look at its achievements and re-prioritise tasks.

“Technical bits”:

• The web-based backend for the online registration for conferences works now with the latest Mono and Ext.Net packages. See this blog article written by TimotheusP.
• The work on a Linux remote developer’s machine got delayed a bit, but it will be announced soon. We might use that as a testing environment for an early round of user acceptance tests.
• TimotheusP is working on rewriting the layout manager of the generated WinForms (thereby removing the dependency on the WinForms TableLayoutPanel), which should improve the screen layouts on both Windows and Linux clients.
• We can now create Solution and Project Files in the SharpDevelop 4.1 file formats.

Thank you for your interest and support,

ChristianK for the OpenPetra developers.

• Overall we picked up speed again in development over the past months. The newer team members contribute to OpenPetra to a larger extent now and are making good progress.
• We have released OpenPetra Version 0.2.16 Alpha on December 22nd, 2011. Previously Version 0.2.14 Alpha was released on 10 November 2011. For details see http://www.openpetra.org/en/download-openpetraorg/
• ChristianK was and is busy preparing for the visit of eight students and a professor from Calvin College, U.S.A (http://www.calvin.edu/). He is co-ordinating the lining up of various projects and will be involved with several projects during their two-week inter-term overseas experience in Carlisle, England. A good mix of programming and research & development awaits them. We are looking forward to them contributing to OpenPetra!
• ChristianK finished work on the framework for data validation which he made a start on earlier this year. This framework helps the software engineers to check data entered in all kinds of screens against certain rules, e.g. a number entered must be positive, a date entered must lie in the future, etc. The framework makes this easy and consistent for the software engineers and the users get consistent and helpful messages across the application if data they entered isn’t quite right. Validation messages can of course be translated. They feature unique error codes so support personnel who can’t read the validation message a user is contacting them about because it is in a language they can’t understand can know what it means by looking up the error code’s meaning.
• MatthiasS is following the testing strategy and started testing the main screens and functionality of the partner module. He will continue working on different aspects of testing and quality assurance and invest some time setting up test cases to run automatically. Part of it will be done in co-operation with the Calvin students.
• WolfgangB has implemented both the Local Partner Data Tab and the Family Members Tab on the Partner Edit Screen. He is now starting to design and implement screens and functionality for extracts in the Partner Module with the prospect of a group of students helping with parts of this in January.
• TimI has been working on the Accounts Payable subsystem, adding functionality to that which already existed.
• AlanP completed the four Maintain Table screens and has since worked on the Local Data Labels screen for Partner and Personnel which had some increased complexity and is almost finished now.
• ChristopherT finished work on the processing of the Admin Fees and moved onto Budgeting. He is converting the Budget segments of the Petra 2.x program code into the C# programming language. Phase 1 of this work is now completed, Phase 2 (import/export and autogenerate) has been started.
• JoachimM has almost finished work on the Debian Package. He had to reduce his current involvement in order to focus on his diploma thesis for the next few months.
• TimotheusP merged the branch that uses the Benerator open source software to generate random partner addresses for OpenPetra. This is useful for testing and demonstration purposes. ThomasS has finished his work on that branch.
• TimotheusP made huge speed improvements to the build system, making life much easier again for the developers.
• TimotheusP completed the switch to .Net 4.0, both on Windows and Linux
• TimotheusP worked on a nightly build server for OpenPetra standalone. It now included NUnit tests and produces a Windows standalone installer for each build. This will help a lot with testing. You can find the latest untested build at http://ci-win.solidcharity.com/job/OpenPetraBuildWin/
• TimotheusP was working on support of Online Registration for ExtJS4. Still much work to do to get the Online Backend to work with ext.net and Mono 2.10
• TimotheusP did work on a Linux remote developer’s machine, to offer remote access to people interested in joining the project. Details will follow soon!
• Sqlite on Linux is now supported again

Thank you for your interest and support, WolfgangB for the OpenPetra developers

Because the recent months have been very busy we didn’t find the time to write a two-monthly news update. Sorry! Here comes a delayed update on what’s happened in the OpenPetra project during that time.

• We have released OpenPetra Version 0.2.12 Alpha on September 19th, 2011. Much work has been done in the area of the Finance Module, specifically in the General Ledger sub-system. For details see http://www.openpetra.org/en/download-openpetraorg/!
• WolfgangB decided to hand over the project management of OpenPetra to MatthiasS. This hand-over has the full support of the core development team and the International IT leadership. WolfgangB is now focussing on software development.
• MatthiasS has set up a project plan over the last months. In his new role as project manager he continues to review and prioritise tasks in order to manage the future direction of development. He also came up with a strategy for testing that will help to ensure that OpenPetra will become high-quality software.
• TimotheusP has merged quite a few development branches to the main development line, including the ‘Donor Recipient History’ functionality, which was created earlier on by MatthiasH.
• TimotheusP has also created a CentOS package for OpenPetra. JoachimM and TimotheusP have been working together on creating a Debian package for OpenPetra (CentOS and Debian are Linux distributions).
• ChristopherT worked on the processing of the Admin Fees when posting a Gift Batch, which is part of his continued work on the International Clearing House sub-system of the Finance Module. He is converting many segments of the Petra 2.x program code into the C# programming language. Phase 1 of this work is now completed, Phase 2 has been started.
• TimI has recently started working on the OpenPetra system. With a background in ‘back-end nuts and bolts’, TimI chose as his first OpenPetra job the file import and export facilities. Some code already existed in this area, so TimI has spent several weeks ‘beefing up’ the source code so that it exports and imports all supported fields, and copes appropriately with all the possible error conditions. The user interface is similar to that in Petra 2.x, although the various supported file formats now use a single user interface.
• WolfgangB has implemented both the Relationships Tab and the Subscriptions Tab in the Partner Edit screen and is now working on the Local Partner Tab, which is also a part of the central Partner Edit screen.
• AlanP has continued to work on four more Maintain Table screens and should complete this work soon.
• ChristianK performed an investigation into various technical solutions and their estimated efforts for various ways of implementing a major part of the Personnel Module. The conclusion was that it can be done in the way that was most preferred by OM’s International Personnel staff – by implementing a ‘Personnel Data’ Tab Group in the Partner Edit screen that the user can simply switch to. ChristianK did the implementation, with three Individual Data screens of Petra 2.x (which use different features) already converted. Those can now be taken as a template for converting further screens.
• ChristianK continues to be the point person for many of the technical questions that the new developers have and is continuing to improve technical documentation in our wiki.
• Many errors in various parts of the application were fixed and the Partner Find screen got improved.
• We had a 3-day developer meeting in Carlisle at the beginning of November. The aims were to again bring the core development team together in one place, with remote team members being present, to make decisions on a number of topics and to plan ahead for the next months. The meeting went very well, important decisions were made and we are all encouraged.
• One of the outcomes of the meeting is that one more developer will be assigned to work on the Finance Module as soon as he has finished his current work on other things in OpenPetra. We also decided that we should approach one person to see if he would be interested in becoming a tester for OpenPetra.

“Technical bits”:

• AlanP created the ‘OpenPetra Developer’s Assistant’, a very useful tool that raises the productivity of the software developers. It provides a graphical front-end to the otherwise commandline-centric tools that are used in the development of OpenPetra. It simplifies and speeds up many common tasks, captures and parses logfile output and makes working with several configurations and working in several branches easier.
• AlanP investigated ways of documenting OpenPetra’s database schema in a more helpful, graphical way and found a good solution for that. We really liked the outcome when he showed it to us at the developer’s meeting and we asked him to go ahead with the implementation.
• TimotheusP streamlined the source code in the Finance module. The result is cleaner and paves the way for further implementations in the Finance module. He also centralised source code that is responsible for the data transfer between the server and client parts of OpenPetra, making it easier to understand and test.
• An effort was made to reduce the number of compiler warnings to lessen the ‘noise’ of the build outputs. Also, our build server got migrated from Hudson to Jenkins.
• The Forms generator saw several improvements.
• We can now create Solution and Project Files in the Visual Studio 2010 format (we had already support for the 2008 formats), again widening the choice of Integrated Development Environments for developers. Support for the new SharpDevelop 4.1 file formats is in the pipeline.

Thank you for your interest and support,

ChristianK for the OpenPetra developers.