Slow Web Access

I found one irksome problem. ILog Gantt runs extremely slowly on a standard Web site using conventional means of access. I don't have the highest speed connection in the civilized world, but it's a respectable 512 Kbps DSL connection. ILog provides a number of demos on its Web site. The interactive demo is the most important because it demonstrates the product. You can interact and work with this demonstration and see how ILog Gantt for .NET runs as a Web application. (The other "demonstrations" on the Web site are Macromedia Flash presentations that show various application features.) The results are definitely not impressive. You can see how a less-capable version of this application runs on your local intranet by accessing the Web Demo sample.

When I contacted the vendor about the extreme slowness of their online interactive demonstration, the vendor informed me that the speed issue is a problem with an aging server. However, my own tests show that even a great server doesn't provide much in the way of acceptable performance for online applications. The Web applications worked great on my local intranet, but that's because I have a high-speed connection to transfer the vast amounts of data this product seems to require; the slower standard Internet connection shows what people visiting your Web site will actually see. Take my advice: try the demo first to see if ILog Gantt will meet your expectations when using the connection you plan to employ.

Fortunately, after some research, I found a good answer to the Web application performance woes in the vendor documentation. The "Embedding Windows® Forms Controls into Internet Explorer" help topic tells how to use an <Object> tag to embed your ILog Gantt for .NET custom control into a Web-based application. This technique works very well for a company intranet or Internet sites when you rely exclusively on Internet Explorer as your browser. You can install the custom control on the user's machine as part of the setup and know that the user will get adequate performance on the road. This may be the only acceptable solution, if you know your users rely on a slower connection to access your public Web site. In short, I can't recommend ILog Gantt for general use in a Web application unless you have good control over the user's browser and setup.

Lots of Samples

Like everyone else, I try to save myself a little pain in learning a new product. Among the vendor-supplied aids that I always try first are the tutorials or demos. ILog provides a number of samples, and you should at least try them out to see what ILog Gantt can do. However, I also found the example code quite helpful. This is an extremely flexible product, and you can easily find yourself getting lost in all of the configuration details. In fact, my first sample application made a mountain out of a molehill until I discovered there was an easier way to accomplish what I wanted to do (as demonstrated by the CustomGantt sample).

You'll find eleven quick start samples that demonstrate basic concepts and three full-fledged applications supplied as part of the product. Many samples appear in your choice of C# or Visual Basic (four of the quick start samples and all of the applications appear only in C#). The samples are well documented, so you can follow the development logic.

Make sure you spend time with the easy-to-use documentation as you work through the samples. The table of contents lays out the information as a progression of steps to create your application. However, the important issue is to see how the various features interact as you go along; you'll find that any application you build requires multiple controls to implement. It's easy to waste a lot of time with this product if you don't create the right control combinations at the outset. (Obviously, I learned the hard way.) The documentation includes the usual reference section at the end. However, between these two extremes are some interesting nuggets of information that you'll definitely want to explore. For example, there's a great section on using this product with ADO.NET to store your data once you obtain it from the user.

The Bottom Line

ILog Gantt chart is a powerful, flexible, and complex tool, and I didn't even begin to show you the applications you can create in this review. Anyone needing to manage time using a custom interface will likely want to add ILog Gantt to his toolbox. Despite poor Web performance in some circumstances, the tool works in both desktop and Web applications. Plus, the vendor samples and good documentation make the learning curve less steep than other tools.