We are pleased to announce Chandler 0.5. This release of Chandler focuses on building out some of the core calendaring functionality for supporting basic individual and collaborative calendaring tasks.

In 0.5, you should be able to: * Create, edit and delete calendar events. * Navigate around the calendar in the near and distant future through the calendar summary and mini-calendar views. * Review past and upcoming events in daily and weekly granularity. * Collaborate on a shared individual calendar, allowing multiple authors to read, create and edit events on the shared calendar. * Experimentally import/export iCalendar files.

In addition, the 0.5 Release provides: * Initial support for extending chandler: early adopters can experiment with building form based parcels. * Improvements in performance and reliability. * Email attachment infrastructure. * New improved sharing architecture. * Incremental visual improvements.

You can download the release for Linux, MacOS, and Windows, at: http://downloads.osafoundation.org/chandler/releases/0.5/

For more information, see the Chandler 0.5 Read Me document http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Chandler/ChandlerZeroPointFiveReadme

OSAF would like to welcome Philippe Bossut who joins the OSAF staff as Development Manager for the Applications Group. He will manage the team developing Chandler’s Graphic User Interface (GUI), bringing his passion for the end user and his experience in shipping desktop applications that the rest of us can use.

You can see more information on Philippe and the other OSAF staff on our People page.

The March/April issue of IEEE Internet Computing has a great article written by Lisa Dusseault, OSAF’s standards architect and author of the IETF CalDAV draft, and Jim Whitehead, Assistant Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz, founder and former chair of the IETF WebDAV working group. This article is a terrific overview and technical introduction to the new standard that OSAF is using for sharing calendars in Chandler. Click here to view the article. Read the rest of this entry »

The focus of the repository work for Chandler’s 0.5 release was mostly about startup and commit performance. The approach taken was to run these operations in the hotshot profiler to find out more about the slow areas and rework them. This macro-performance effort can yield useful results. For instance, commit was made twice as fast by rewriting it to not use any XML.
For 0.6, I’d like to also look at performance at the micro-level.

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We are looking for a dedicated systems administrator and tool smith who will maintain and extend the systems supporting the Foundation’s development activities. This person will oversee and advise the IT support function for a dynamic group of non-technical, non-profits that share space in our SOMA offices.

Please see OSAF’s Employment page for details on this and the other positions we have open.

PyCon 2005, the Python conference, http://www.pycon.org is the week of March 21 in Washington D.C. There will be a fairly sizable representation from OSAF this year. We will be doing two presentations, one on building Chandler parcels and one on PyLucene. Thursday night there will be a Chandler BOF session.

In addition, Ted Leung will be leading a two day Developer Tutorial and Sprint during the pre-conference sprints on March 21 & 22. And if you are interested in PyLucene, Andi Vajda will be one of the OSAF’ers at the sprints, so there will be opportunities to do PyLucene stuff as well.

The Developer Sprint will be the first time we get to test out the “Developer Dogfood” aspects of Chandler and see if open source community developers can understand our architecture and APIs, and actually build a working Chandler Parcel from scratch in 2 days.

OSAF would like to welcome Mike “Bear” Taylor who joins the OSAF staff as Build Tools & Release Engineer in the Build/QA workgroup. Bear has always been interested in the work required behind the scenes delivering an application to users. He officially joins the team at OSAF after volunteering on the project almost from the beginning. His role as Build Tools & Release Engineer is to help tame the complexities of building a product in three distinct environments.

You can see more information on Bear and the other OSAF staff on our People page.