The Chandler Project Blog

Lately, I’ve been working on zanshin, a new Python HTTP/WebDAV/CalDAV library. As of release 0.5.03, Chandler has been using zanshin for sharing and syncing over HTTP.

The project was originally conceived by Lisa Dusseault, and its main motivation is to provide a high-level API focused on resources and their properties. In this way, clients are isolated from the details of caching data, making and maintaining HTTP connections, and from the specifics of requests and responses. In addition, like other services in Chandler, it leverages the good stuff in the Twisted networking framework.

At the moment, the WebDAV support is pretty rudimentary – just enough to get Chandler syncing and sharing working. In the works are:

• A spec for the functionality to be implemented for Chandler 0.6


• Support for caching and (strong) ETags


• CalDAV support

For more information, see the zanshin project page on the Chandler Wiki. The source is available under the M.I.T. license in our subversion repository (see the preceding project page for a link). Feedback and comments are welcome, and should be sent to the OSAF dev list.

Highlights

• Chandler milestone 0.5.04 moved to July 13
• Dev work is progressing, with holes remaining in some specs as we get technical details filled in with information from developers.

Chandler bug highlights:

• 312 open 0.6 bugs, including 90 needing triage
• Bugs resolved in last 7 days: 22. New (and still open) bugs in last 7 days: 22.

Design Team

Progress: Finishing up on spec work for 0.6 and working through open issues.

Plans: Get involved in accessibility planning. Scheduling reviews for visual guidelines, timezone and sharing specs.

Applications

Progress: Many bug fixes in detail view, sidebar, wxImage, keyboard arrow key support

Personnel: Alec on paternity leave. Donn on vacation.

Services

Progress: iCalendar tests created. Heikki investigating query notification thread problem. Recurrence spec additions.

Plans: Produce Zanshin project documentation and specs and choose license. Start implementing recurrence.

Developer Platform and Repository

Progress: Schema API clouds support. More work on PyICU and getString. New Item Collection spec version published.

Plans: Repository support for sets. Migrating parcels to Schema API. Item Collection approaching review and implementation. I18n architecture planning nearing completion and public review.

Server (Cosmo and Scooby)

Progress: Reviewed Scooby plan with Mitch. Cosmo ticket support mostly working.

Plans: Publish revised scooby plan. Continue hiring effort.

QA

Progress: Updated smoke tests — now called Acceptance Tests. Tested 0.5.03 milestone. Installed Cosmo 0.2-1. Performance test plans completed and platforms chosen. Added silk tests.

Plans: IRC chat this week to get test participation. Reformat Kilauea and reinstall Tiger on it. Run performance use cases. Start writing a parcel (Anthony).

Build

Progress: Continued work on converting Bonsai to SVN.

Plans: work on P1 build bugs. Add startup unit tests.

IT:

Progress: Almost finished a big scrub through outstanding tickets — queue now at 52 tickets. A linux test machine made available to devs with Ubuntu.

Plans: Deal with priority tickets, including Palm and Tiger synch, request for spam management for mailman, demo server. Top projects (not tickets): Linux developer server to FC4, work on virtual server, security updates and VPN planning.

Community/Communications/Conferences:

Progress: Phone conf with Greg Jackson, discussed perceptions of progress as well as needs for mobile device support.

Plans: Pieter to follow up suggesting dates for getting CSG or WAC participants together to follow up in detail on mobile device support possibilities. Ted planning OSCon attendance.

I will be in Europython 2005 from June 27 to July 1. I will be giving a presentation of Chandler in the business track.

I have also spared the last two days for an M2Crypto sprint. We are using M2Crypto in Chandler for the crypto/SSL stuff.

Andi Vajda is the other OSAF developer going to Europython. Andi is giving a talk on PyLucene. PyLucene will provide full text search for Chandler.

We’d be happy to talk with you about all Chandler-related stuff.

I’ve just published the latest revision of the Item Collection spec. This version fleshes out the notification story a bit more, and contains some sample code demonstrating tradeoffs between possible API designs.

Feedback is definitely welcome — just send it to the dev list.

One of the major lessons we have learned from other software projects is: design your product from the beginning to be localizable. Many projects that
failed to consider Internationalization concerns in the architecture discovered just how hard it is to bolt on at a later date.

In the next few days I will be publshing the second version of the Chandler Internationalization Proposal. To give you a sneak peak, Chandler will be leveraging IBM’s ICU library and porting it to Python via Swig wrappers and will be adding new types to the Repository to support Localization of Unicode text. We will also be writting a custom version of pygettext.py that lets developers use the gettext .po format that is industry standard in the Open Source community while leveraging the Repository for the storage of translatable content.

Stay tuned!

• Choose WordPress from the pulldown list of blog tools
• Host: wp.osafoundation.org
• Path: /xmlrpc.php
• Port: 80 (no https)
• Use your own account login and password

Use Post & Publish button to post your content. If you use the Post button it only saves the content as a “Draft”.

Almost sounds like old news but worth noticing: we reached the milestone on 06/02 (code wise) and it got the QA rubber stamp yesterday.
You can download a build and read the report card.
Special thanks to the members of the Apps team who all had deliveries with dead line for that milestone and worked over time to deliver the goods.
(NB: this post is also my first OSAF Blog post…)

We have finally added the Chandler startup silktest script to tinderbox. Many thanks to Bear for helping out. Here’s what the script does:

1. Downloads the latest windows build from the builds page.
2. Installs the build.
3. Starts Chandler with a fresh repository.
4. Creates a new note in Chandler.
5. Quits Chandler.
6. Uninstalls Chandler.
7. Send the results to tinderbox server.

Now it’s a matter of monitoring the tinderbox page to make sure it stays green.

Did you know Chandler now supports sharing to a webserver over SSL/TLS connection? Look in your account settings for sharing, and check the SSL box and you are all set. Some bugs remain, so please check Bugzilla if something does not work and file new ones if appropriate.

PS. My first ever blog post.

Bear noticed the following:

Mike Taylor to everyone —

There is a subtle quirk in how the auto-link and the markdown plugins
are interacting: if you have a url at the *very end* of a paragraph,
the link will get mangled and the presentation of the wp page gets all
funky.

To work around this quirk you just need to place any character after
your link. A space, period, anything will do the trick.