Many moons ago, a couple of crazy people (Dani, Jon, and Brion) and I set out to build a collaborative project management system. We called it Govedo. We built an amazing web framework (for the time, circa 2000) called SmartMode, but we never really got a working version of the project management system.

Dani and Jon joined Patrick Leung and went on to build son-of-Govedo at IntelliBank.

Okay... this is starting to sound like a bit from Monty Python ("and I built a second castle and that one fell into the swamp...")

IntelliBank had an awesome product, but never got traction.

Dani and Jon joined a company called Koral and built an even better product and they were acquired by SalesForce (way to go guys!)

Still, I've had this need for a multi-person, multi-project task manage system.

Working on lift I've been dealing with a lot of very complex AJAX/Comet user interaction models.

As I started abstracting the user interactions and some of the UI features, not to mention the JSON object rendering and synchronization, I realized that I could express these things in a collaborative task manager.

So, I spent about 30 hours building this first incarnation of Much4.

It's a showcase for lift. It's about 750 lines of code. Also, it's a simple, Scrum-oriented collaborative task manager. You can create projects, add tasks to the projects, add members to the projects, assign due dates, points (difficulty) and priority. All without loading a new web page. When a task that you care about changes, your task list will instantly update.

I kept faithful to the Govedo orange and in my typical style, the CSS sucks beyond all values of ugly.

There are features that I'm working on (e.g., real-time task chat, changing the project or owner of a given task, adding milestones to projects, etc.) I'm also dealing with connection pools, MySQL, and the immense suckiness between them.

So, if you've got projects and tasks, give it a try. If you've been curious about lift and it's best-in-class Comet and AJAX facilities, give it a try.

Thanks! David

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