WeKan: Open-Source Meteor Kanban | Hacker News Reader

WeKan: Open-Source Meteor Kanban

wekan.io

194 pointsbased239 comments

I recently built a Kanban board for Github using react:

https://adewes.github.io/gitboard

It's fully client-side and doesn't require a server or giving a third party access to your Github account, and it's open-source.

Aesthetically, the app looks great. Is it normal for there to be zero test coverage in a meteor app? That concerns me. I did see this thread in the issue tracker: https://github.com/wekan/wekan/issues/467

> Is it normal for there to be zero test coverage in a meteor app?

In my experience, yes. Meteor has traditionally had a culture that focused a lot on tech demos and experimental projects, rather than stability and production. Sort of the anti-Angular 1.x. :)

(Man, I wonder if that comparison will annoy Angular fans or Meteor fans more? But I think it has some truth in it.)

Initially Meteor didn't have any support for testing apps. Since it has always had support for testing packages, teams generally had to split their app up into several private packages to allow for testing (with benefits to modularity too).

The Velocity project [1] was started to address this issue and now supports testing apps with Jasmine, Cucumber, and Mocha. There are also individual testing frameworks for Meteor apps such as Nightwatch (now StarryNight).

Even with Velocity, testing a Meteor app is not as easy to set up as testing a Rails app so I would guess most teams don't make it a priority unless they are going into production.

Packages, however, are another story and my impression is that all of the most popular packages [2] have fairly extensive test suites.

1. http://velocity.meteor.com 2. https://atmospherejs.com/packages/most-used

> Initially Meteor didn't have any support for testing apps.

I don't understand what this means... why do you need a framework to "support" testing. Can't you just... write a test using QUnit or Mocha or Tape or whatever you like?

The framework can make or break your testing. If it's very hard or impossible to mock parts of the framework, your testing will be significantly hindered.

Yes, Meteor apps generally do not have tests. There is not a test tool that integrates to it well. At best there's Velocity but that's been deprecated for Chimp or some other tool. Pretty bad situation.

Built in testing suite is coming with the next release - 1.3.

Yes, and I am super duper pumped.

I've been looking for an on-premise Trello for months and WeKan seems to be the best option for now. How would you guys feel about deploying such a project for 300 people? Too soon?

As pointed out in another comment, there are no tests. Developer confidence doesn't matter at that point. You can help them out at https://github.com/wekan/wekan/issues/467

Thanks. I realize how premature my wish is but unfortunately not in my qualifications to help on the project. Modern group chat and Kanban are two apps my users desperately want and I can't deliver unless I capitulate to our cloud overlords, such a sad state of the industry.

Wouldn't Mattermost solve the group chat issue for you?

This sentiment is what's sad. You appear to want something good, free and quick. Life is all about picking 2. Accept that and be happy.

Who said I wanted it to be free? I'm also in France and our clients don't want us to manage their projects on American servers.

You can get a self hosted HipChat for the group chat.

We've had a pilot for 6 months, users stopped using it. Something's fishy with the HipChat team. They've been asked to fix iPhone notifications[0] for more than a year now and all I see is new emoticons and silly features. Nobody with an iPhone can use HipChat, no wonder everyone went to Slack. Smells like internal sabotage, crazy stuff really.

[0]https://help.hipchat.com/forums/138883-suggestions-ideas/sug...

> Modern group chat [...]

There's another great Meteor project named Rocket Chat that you should check out...

https://rocket.chat/

We've tried them all and unfortunately none of them are ready for prime time. Rocket chat and Mattermost are the ones I'm the most looking forward to, looks like they should be ready in a few months. HipChat Server looks ready but it's not, way too many problems they're not willing to address for whatever reasons.

Did you document your issues somewhere publicly? (blog post?) A good comparison of the options would be interesting to have, since the topic seems to come up quite often.

I haven't but it's a good idea.

"How would you guys feel about deploying such a project for 300 people?"

As long as they don't all try to connect at the same time you should be fine.

I've been using Wekan daily for a while now and I'd say it's pretty solid.

I hope you'll also consider running Wekan on top of Sandstorm (I'm the lead developer of Sandstorm). Wekan's developer is a fan of Sandstorm, as you can see here:

https://discuss.wekan.io/t/support-exclusively-sandstorm/135

You might find some other apps you'd like to run on-prem. :) https://apps.sandstorm.io

I've used Sandstorm when I tried Wekan but didn't really take the time to look into it, couldn't find anything about ldap integration with either Sandstorm or Wekan.

Now I've just read a bit more about it and a centralized app portal sure looks very interesting. I'll contact you guys in the next few weeks for your "Sandstorm + Business" offerings ;)

Am I missing the 'kanban' part? This just looks like a Trello clone to me.

Is there anything actually relating to kanban built in? Like limiting the # of items, tracking cycle time, etc?

I can't find ANY settings anywhere.

Also, I can't figure out what a 'Grain' is. I think it might be a 'Board', but when I click on an App, it loads a page w/ boards, that isn't the same page as 'Grains'

So, no tests, no documentation, no settings, so kanban-specific features.

The Grain/App thing isn't from Wekan, but from Sandstorm.io which they use for the demo. A "grain" in sandstorm-terminology is an instance of an app (e.g. Wekan) on a sandstorm.io server.

I wonder if Maxime has considered using the newly announced Meteor-Electron project to package this as a desktop app - I am really in the market for a simple, open source task tracker that I can run as a desktop app so that I can alt-tab and similar.

A simple wrapper like nativefier should suffice...

https://github.com/jiahaog/nativefier

I love WeKan - we use at at Bytemark (www.bytemark.co.uk) for our internal to-do board - high level project tracking across the company with 28 staff.

Excellent work.

But why does the browser history get so polluted?

(Every click in the app seems to add an entry in the browser history.)

noticed this as well. super cool demo though.

src: http://korben.info/wekan-un-clone-de-trello-a-heberger-vous-...

Took me a while to find this but https://github.com/wekan/wekan/wiki/Install-and-Update contains the instructions to install

I can't seem to scroll the homepage.

Latest stable Chrome. Windows 10. Touch screen. Scrolling using mouse scrollwheel as well as trackpad gesture.

There's nothing on the homepage under the screenshot. I think it just doesn't scroll.

Awesome work. Contrats to all the team involved.

It's a nice tools for dev and project management.I will try it at our team.

Awesome project, as a total aside, isn't there an issue with using Trello's name on your site?

Why would referring to Trello by its name be illegal? They do not make any false statements!wnts about Trello.

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