The Chandler Project Blog

Chandler Desktop has been in “release a Desktop dot version about once a month” mode since Preview shipped last year, and with that in mind, we’re still on track to release a 0.7.5 early in March. Besides the usual round of stability and usability fixes, here’s what’s in the works:

1. User Interface changes

   The trunk currently has implemented a fair deal of the Task → Star and
   Pared
   down Desktop UI proposals. Also, as my personal scratchy itch (and with some UI
   help from Mimi), I’ve made user collections in the sidebar re-orderable via drag-and-drop.

2. Cosmo security fixes

   Randy Letness has been the driver for addressing a security issue on
   the server side, where it’s relatively easy to give yourself read-write
   access to items that have been shared with you read-only. 0.7.5 will
   have some fixes to make things work more smoothly on the client
   side (see this thread
   for some of the discussion that went into this).

3. Printing

   Reid Ellis did some good work to get basic printing support in on
   a branch. Printing month views is working well for me, so I will
   be integrating his code into the trunk (possibly with some minor
   polish).

Here are a couple of linkies for your mouse clicking convenience:

• Bugs
  resolved so far in 0.7.5.
• The Desktop Work Queue, which I’m using as a guide for what to code next.

If there are fixes you would dearly love to see in 0.7.5, feel free to comment in bugs (or file new ones): I’ll do my best to respond. Patches are welcome, as is testing help. I will be releasing some checkpoint builds in the next week or two as we lead up to the actual release.

The Chandler Project is pleased to announce the 0.7.4.1 release of Chandler Desktop.

Chandler Desktop is an open source, standards-based personal information manager (PIM) built around small group collaboration and a core set of information management workflows modelled on Inbox usage patterns.

The 0.7.4.1 release contains the fix for a bug that severely complicated upgrades from version 0.7.3; see

#11823 Couldn’t migrate 0.7.3 to 0.7.4 on MacOSX

for details.

The 0.7.4.1 release is a single bug-fix release to 0.7.4, which was the fourth in a series of ongoing releases since Chandler Preview 0.7.0 intended to respond to the ongoing feedback received from users. Additional releases improving Chandler Desktop are planned and ongoing.

Chandler Desktop 0.7.4.1 is available for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux here.

Additional information is available from the Chandler Project homepage .

Thanks for your interest in Chandler Desktop!

Earlier this week I represented OSAF at the 4th CalConnect Interop. This entailed spending a day and half in a room with a bunch of other calendaring vendors, trying to make sure that our software works with theirs.

Most of the work I did involved CalDAV client-server testing. Besides OSAF’s own Cosmo, there were servers from Novell, RPI and Oracle to test against. It turns out that these servers work sufficiently differently from ours that they exposed interesting and useful bugs in our CalDAV client implementation.

Two other CalDAV clients besides Chandler were represented: Mozilla’s Sunbird client, and Evolution (with CalDAV plugin). Brian Moseley had set up a machine at OSAF where he could debug a test server, and was available on IRC to help diagnose problems. Both Evolution and Sunbird use a different method of downloading events from a CalDAV server than Chandler, so Brian (with the help of Bobby Rullo) was able to chase down a couple of good bugs.

In the remaining time, I was able to squeeze in some testing of interoperability of ICalendar (.ics) files with other vendors, including Novell Groupwise, EVDB and Trumba. This, too, turned up a couple of interesting bugs.

All in all, it was very helpful to devote some time to interoperability, especially in an environment where you can discuss issues with other developers, and, in some cases, resolve or work around them. Thanks to CalConnect for organising, and to Novell for hosting us in their lovely Executive Briefing suite.

OSCON 2005 was my first conference since I entered the open source world by joining OSAF
in January, so it was really great for me to get a sense of the huge variety of open source
development that’s going on in the world. In a way, for me the conference was like
getting a compressed three-day college degree in open source. Some of the “classes” had little
to do with software per se, but were quite fascinating. Examples that stand out here were the presentation on UCSF’s archive of internal tobacco industry documents made public by the industry’s settlement of lawsuits with several states,
and Robert Lang’s
keynote on the open-source-like approach that has led to amazing developments in origami in the last fifty years, or).

I did attend the OSAF presentations (Ted ’s Chandler parcel session, and the
CalDAV panel and BOF). It was clear that there is a high level of interest both in Chandler
and interoperable calendaring. In the case of the latter, there were quite a few
questions about scheduling (a separate draft from the base CalDAV spec). In general, this
is something both technical and non-technical users really want from calendaring, so
ironing this stuff out will be pretty important for both Chandler and CalDAV.

Overall, I tried to attend sessions from a variety of different tracks. I the course of my hopping
around, there were a couple of session that stood out for me as interesting sagas
of real-world deployment and scaling issues, and how systems become complex in unanticipated
ways: Brad Fitzpatrick’s talk on LiveJournal’s Backend, and Randal Schwartz’s on anti-spam measures he’s
tried over the years on his domain’s mail server. (The latest, a trick with MX DNS records, seems to be
working quite well … for now!) Also, Anthony Baxter’s
overview of shtoom
(his Twisted-based VOIP implementation) was delivered
in inimitable style, and gave good insight into implementing telephony standards in today’s internet.

So far as technology goes, I found Johannes Ernst’s presentation on
LID
pretty interesting (and Dick Hardt’s earlier keynote on Identity 2.0 was
an entertaining and accessible introduction to the general problem of identity on the web). While there are competing
initiatives in this space, but eventually this is something Chandler will have to think about. There was enough detail in the
Ruby On Rails keynote
for me to get a sense of what RoR is all about, even though
I know next to nothing about Ruby and don’t work on web apps! One catch-phrase that stood out was
“xml sit-ups”: the chore of having to edit and maintain XML configuration files (which RoR
helps you avoid). In the case of Chandler, too, the move away from parcel xml will mean less ab work for parcel
developers!

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.