TimeFinder-Planner a Primitive MigCalendar?

Yesterday I annouced a new version of TimeFinder. With that version a new and very simple component called TimeFinder Planner is included and can be easily integrated into an existing Swing or Spring RC project. It is already mavenized but I can deploy a full jar if necessary.

Of course it is not as feature reach as MigCalendar, but  you can use it as a read only calendar component in you own apps – it is Open Source (Apache License 2), small (<30KB) and has only relative few dependencies (~1MB). It supports ‘conflicting’ events, i.e. if events would be at the same time.

Look here for some screenshots in my TimeFinder application:

At the same time you can ‘zoom’ into one event simply via the “mouse over” action. And it should be able to handle any possibility of conflicts (overlapping events):

The performance should be also good even for a lot of events per week (independent from all events!). This cannot be seen in a screenshot but you can try TimeFinder and import the data of JavaOne 2009 via the ‘File’ menu item. Look here for the video explanation.

TimeFinder v4 Released – Automatic Educational Scheduling

Today the TimeFinder Team (its me )
announces the availability of TimeFinder v4!

TimeFinder allows universities and schools to reduce and even avoid conflicts in the timetable! TimeFinder will improve the work of the human timetabler at the institute. A lot of work which would be done by hand to create the educational schedule could be done with TimeFinder.

TimeFinder is completely free and independent of the operating system (via Java 6). The power of TimeFinder is its algorithm. It eliminates the hard-conflicts of nearly all datasets of the International Timetabling Competition 08 in under 20 seconds on a normal laptop. And it can be applied on real data like the one from University of Bayreuth.

Pictures tells a lot more than 1000 words, so here are some screenshots and here is a video as introduction.

The first screenshot is how editing of events works

1. create a new event
2. then set the name
3. and specify the start and duration
4. after this you can add some visitors under Event Table->Persons

And here you see how TimeFinder optimized an instance of the International Timetabling Competition 08:

See some more screenshots and look again here for the video documentation.

Start TimeFinder right now via WebStart! Or download the jar which is faster!

New Features

The TimeFinder Team worked hard to add the following features in this version for you:

1. Events with any duration are now possible – without performance losings! (before only duration=1 was possible)
2. A more robust and lightweight Swing component the TimeFinderPlanner to display the schedule/timetable of all locations and persons was implemented and replaces the JavaFX component hassle. This component is small (<30KB) and but has some dependencies (1MB). It has the same purpose as MigCalendar, but is of course not as powerful as this.
3. Import of text files (tab separated, comma separated data). XML was already supported in previous versions
4. Auto-import for the last imported file
5. Cloning entities is now possible
6. Anonymize data, so that institutes could give away there data for performance-tests and other research projects.
7. Import of the data for University of Bayreuth (Germany) and the possibility to optimize this data set with >1500 events; >100 locations; >600 resources (persons/course of studies) is now possible and shows how other institutes could use its existing data with TimeFinder.
8. Removed a lot of deprecated classes and removed unused dependencies (now ~11MB)
9. Now the English TimeFinder is fully translated into German too. Translation is now simplified with a small tool.
10. A new maven module called algo was created (~3MB), to reduce coupling of the algorithm to the GUI. Now it is theoretically possible to deploy the algorithm without the spring dependency e.g. to an optimization server.

Support

No software is complete or bug-free, and so is TimeFinder which is beta software at the moment. You are free to support TimeFinder with your constructive critique, blog posts or even money if you like to make it better. Feel free to contact me or raise an issue if you find a bug.

Check the documentation or watch an introductive video to get an overview. Keep in mind that updating documentation is still work in progress.

You can win

If you know some Java and like coding GUIs, databases or algorithms you can contact me and win experiences via joining the project!

Especially the calendar component TimeFinderPlanner could be alluring for people with Java2d experiences or interests in this area.

Thanks!

This application wouldn’t be the same without the following nice open source projects:

• Spring Rich Client
• JGoodies
• Joda-Time
• Glazedlists
• Nacho Calendar

… and last but not least thanks to NetBeans – the only IDE you need
and Yourkit profiler, which offers open source projects a free license!

TimeFinder – Powerful Optimization Algorithm, RIA and more

TimeFinder is an Open Source Timetable Optimizer for universities and schools, which uses the Spring Rich Client project to create an easy to use application with a nice user interface, a database and … more bla bla …

ok, it is a bit dingy headline and a more dingy introduction, but I would like to invite you to test the latest development version v4 of TimeFinder now! And without such a headline you woudn’t have read this. And I feel that I would like to release TimeFinder in the next weeks, so I need some beta testers. Go here to see some screenshots.

Get the dev version of TimeFinder here, double click the jar (optionally read the documentation for v1) and tell me:

1. If you understand the purpose of TimeFinder from the website
2. If you understand the user interface and how you can insert data
3. If you find a bug
4. If you need other features

Any feedback is welcome! Please contact me at peathal AT yahoo |dot| de, post an email to the mailing list or simply leave a comment here.