Chapter 1. Introduction

1.1. About

JTrac is a generic issue-tracking web-application that can be easily customized by adding custom fields and drop-downs. Features include customizable workflow, field level permissions, e-mail integration, file attachments and a detailed history view.

JTrac was created after the author felt that he could write a much better alternative to a commercial defect tracking tool that he was having to use. Development started in 2004. JTrac is ideal for issue tracking or bug-tracking, but it has been designed to be generic and you can define custom fields to track almost anything you need.

JTrac development used to be hosted at https://jtrac.dev.java.net but moved to SourceForge in early 2006. The older working version was based on Spring MVC, Spring JDBC and MS Access and is not being maintained any more. JTrac 2.0 uses Java 5.0 features and was completely re-written to use Hibernate for persistence and the Acegi Security framework for Spring. The presentation layer for version 2.0 was mainly using Spring WebFlow but as of early 2007 (version 2.1.0 onwards) JTrac switched to using the Apache Wicket framework.

JTrac is extremely easy to install and the only pre-requisite is a Java 5 (or higher) Runtime Environment. You can be up and running in seconds because JTrac comes bundled with a small-footprint web-application server called Jetty and an embedded database called HSQLDB. Please refer to the installation section of this documentation for details. You can also choose to drop the WAR file into an application server of your choice and start using JTrac right away.

1.2. Release Notes: Version 2.1.0

There are no database changes between version 2.0 and 2.1.0. Instructions on how to upgrade are available in the "upgrading" section of this document. The bundled Jetty web-app server has been upgraded from version 6.0.2 to 6.1.1 but it is not mandatory that you upgrade.