Steve On Java

Followers of my blog have probably heard about the Apropos project that I built in JavaFX and released as open-source.  It is an Agile Project Portfolio Planning tool that I developed for work to help manage our large Agile rollout. Apropos is a perfect application of rich client technology, because it sits on top of the web services exposed by Rally, and provides a higher level of visibility and planning.

The folks at Rally Software took notice and have been contributing back to the project to get it customer ready.  They have branded the commercial version of the tool Stratus and are now in the process of a customer beta.

Some of the features that the Rally folks have added to Stratus include:

• Customization of fields and settings
• Performance improvements in the web service communication
• Styling and usability improvements throughout
• A fully hosted environment for customers to use Stratus without any setup

I had the opportunity to present with Ryan Martens, Rally CTO, at the JavaOne Keynote to demonstrate the very latest version:

It was a cool experience to be on the big stage.  I have heard that a lot of presenters get scripted to death in preparation for Keynotes (or at least it always looks that way), but I had a lot of freedom to ad-lib and blend in my demo with Ryan’s talk.

If you or your company are interested in piloting Stratus, send email to stratus@rallydev.com and Rally can engage with your program managers.