Cosmo 0.2.1 is ready for download.

0.2.1 is a bugfix release focusing on interoperability with Chandler 0.6.

Find download instructions, documentation, and the list of resolved issues at the Cosmo home page at . See RELEASE-NOTES.txt in the distribution for upgrade notes.

I’ve written a specification for CMP, the management protocol for Cosmo:

The Cosmo Management Protocol is a RESTful HTTP-based protocol for management of the Cosmo server. Using CMP, clients can get and put XML representations of Cosmo entities for such tasks as creating, updating and deleting user accounts in Cosmo.

Examples of tools that might use CMP:

• Post-installation script for changing the server administrator password and email address
• Bulk loading tool for populating the server with user accounts
• User interface for an external user directory that synchronizes accounts in the directory and Cosmo

i’m happy to announce that Cosmo 0.2 is ready for download.

0.2 adds many usability and interoperability features, including:

* Calendar publication and subscription using CalDAV and WebDAV
* Ticket-based access control
* A web interface for end users to sign up for and manage their own accounts
* A sexy new look for the entire web interface
* The Cosmo Management Protocol (CMP), an HTTP-based protocol for management tasks

with Cosmo 0.2, people can use Chandler 0.6, Apple iCal, and CalDAV clients such as Mozilla Sunbird interchangeably to read and write shared calendars.

the Cosmo home page is . you can find download instructions and links to documentation there. the docs have been separated according to user, so you’ll find individual sections for end users, server administrators, and developers.

i’ll be completing and polishing the 0.2 documentation for the remainder of this week (including the end user guide and the CalDAV and CMP reference docs).

0.3 planning will be kicking off next week during the server team summit. in 0.3 you can look forward to CalDAV reports and user quotas, among other things. more info is forthcoming in the next few weeks.

i’m looking forward to your comments. please let us know what you think. all questions and ideas are welcome.

thanks!

as Cosmo matures, we find ourselves in need of some professional tech writing. there’s all sorts of doc to be written:

• web interface copy
• web interface help system
• end user guide
• administrator guide
• project web site
• developer resources web site

if you are at all interested in what we are doing with Cosmo and are a trained technical writer, please consider donating some of your time. help us bring standards-based calendaring to the common man.

The fourth milestone release of Cosmo 0.2 is ready for download.

Milestone 4 includes support for WebDAV calendar clients such as Apple iCal and Mozilla Sunbird subscribing to CalDAV calendars. These clients may also publish and subscribe to “monolithic” calendars with WebDAV as before.

The final release of 0.2 is scheduled for 09/16. The next two weeks will see a flurry of documentation and bug fixes.

More information about Cosmo is available at the project wiki.

The milestone 3 release of Cosmo 0.2 is ready for download.

Milestone 3 includes a partial CalDAV implementation, including MKCALENDAR, GET and PUT for events (including timezones and alarms), and the new properties specified by CalDAV. Other added features include strong ETag support and full PROPFIND and PROPPATCH implementations.

0.2 is scheduled for release on 09/09. The majority of the remaining work is testing, bug fixes and documentation.

More information about Cosmo is available at the project wiki.

I popped up to OSCon last week for the Wed afternoon CalDAV panel and BOF. I was a little bit surprised and not a little pleased by the standing-room-only attendance at the panel. Things went very well considering the nonexistent amount of detailed planning we’d done - Pieter Hartsook is owed thanks for saving our butts by putting together an agenda and giving us a bit of direction

Observations from the panel:

• I was the only server guy to actually discuss my product’s feature set beyond a general statement of CalDAV support. Unfortunately, because we had not led off the panel with a discussion of what CalDAV actually is, I think some of it went over peoples’ heads :). Still, given the questions I got during the panel and BOF, I’m pretty sure most people got most of what Cosmo has to offer.
• Pretty much all of the other server teams are approaching their products as web applications (presumably on top of SQL databases) that speak CalDAV out the side, whereas we at OSAF are building the protocol server and web application separately, using CalDAV to communicate between the two. You’ll be able to aim Scooby at the UW Calendar and Hula servers, but it’s not clear if you’ll be able to aim one of these servers or WebCalendar at Cosmo.
• In general, the problems that people are having are more complex than the ones we implementers are able to solve at the moment. We’re still getting our feet under us, just becoming able to get and put events interoperably between multiple clients and servers, but the audience asked hard questions about enterprise integration, complex calendaring problems and and advanced scheduling features that we’re very far from being able to address. We’re happy just to have gotten this far (it took ten years to get a calendar access protocol that anybody actually wrote code for), but our users need us to get a lot farther real fast.
• Calendar web applications are popular. Seems like everybody’s working on one. It’s going to be interesting to see how the multiple projects differentiate themselves.

I’m looking forward to ApacheCon, where I’ll hopefully have an hour to explain a lot more about CalDAV and about Cosmo, including why it’s different and more interesting than the other guys’ servers

I’ve released the 0.2-2 milestone of Cosmo, which includes support for WebDAV tickets. Download it here.

For more information about Cosmo 0.2, see the project page.

I’ve updated the Cosmo 0.2 release plan to more accurately reflect our current development priorities and to target a couple more milestones before the final 0.2 release.

We’re just about halfway done overall with 0.2, though most of the feature work should be completed in the next few weeks. The early part of August will be dedicated to testing and documentation. Hopefully the milestone releases will satisfy you client developers until then

Scooby is the OSAF web-based CalDAV client. We’re very early in the process of defining what exactly Scooby will do - suggestions welcome. Also, we’re hiring a UI developer (DHTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML/HTTP) to own the “front end” of the app (I’ll be handling the server parts). For these reasons, and because I’ll be mostly dedicated to Cosmo 0.2 for the next few months, expect slow progress on the Scooby front until we get the UI developer in who can get things in gear.