Horizon Planner is LIVE
Horizon Planner is LIVE! We have reached an important milestone in having Horizon Planner used in production to solve the planning challenges of a company managing thousands of projects, employees and contractors.
In about 3 years of development Horizon Planner managed to cover all important features of legacy Horizon Planner, which was under active development for 7+ years. We made the decision very early on that the next generation Horizon Planner should never be an exact copy of the legacy system. We should instead rely on our experience and on customer feedback to simplify the application, change features that were inconvenient to use, and cut the ones that were not actually used in production.
There were several factors contributing to this achievement. First of all, we could utilize all our experience working on a project planning application for many years. We knew exactly what problems the application should solve, how to present information to our users, and we had a deep understanding how to store all the data efficiently. A second, equally important factor was the use of more modern technology. We are standing on the shoulders of giants indeed:
- Our server infrastructure is orchestrated by Docker.
- We are using Graylog, Nginx, MongoDB just to mention a few powerful tools we have on the server side.
- Backend code and API is created with Python and Flask.
- UI components are provided by FluentUI (developed by Microsoft).
- We forked and extended an open-source library to present the Gantt chart and the Timetable chart of Horizon Planner.
And yes, in legacy Horizon Planner we wrote all the code for the equivalent features ourselves from scratch. We implemented a logging and monitoring solution, we used an in-memory database that we implemented ourselves, all the UI components were created in house, and we presented the chart by drawing pixels on a canvas (keeping all the virtualization needs in mind). It was quite a different experience for a developer. But the world has moved on, and so did we.
We feel our efforts validated and consider the new version of Horizon Planner a success because of the simple fact that it is now responsible for the project planning of a big company, and was able to replace an already successful (though aging) software.