Chandler Server is a server and Ajax web UI for managing and sharing calendars, events, and tasks. It implements open data standards including CalDAV, WebDAV, Atom, and Atompub.

This is a bugfix release to update the visual treatment on the login page and add a new widget specific Javascript build.

Chandler Server 0.14.2 is available for download as a ready-to-run bundle at:

http://chandlerproject.org/serverdownload

and the source code is available from subversion at:

http://svn.osafoundation.org/server/cosmo/tags/rel_0.14.2

Send us feedback at the open mailing list (no subscription required):

chandler-users@osafoundation.org

We look forward to hearing from you!

Chandler Server is a server and Ajax web UI for managing and sharing calendars, events, and tasks. It implements open data standards including CalDAV, WebDAV, Atom, and Atompub.

This is a bugfix release to patch a bug in which users with non-url-safe characters in their usernames or passwords could not log in to the Web UI.

Chandler Server 0.14.1 is available for download as a ready-to-run bundle at:

http://chandlerproject.org/serverdownload

and the source code is available from subversion at:

http://svn.osafoundation.org/server/cosmo/tags/rel_0.14.1

Send us feedback at the open mailing list (no subscription required):

chandler-users@osafoundation.org

We look forward to hearing from you!

The bugs fixed in this release include:

• #11956: Calendar ui double-escaping authentication request

The first changes I’m excited about are, like our latest release, less wholesale modifications than improvements and commitments to stable APIs with performance enhancement sugar to sweeten the deal. Dojo’s internationalization (i18n) and event APIs have matured to the point where developers can expect to rely on them without fearing a future change like the one we’ve just experienced. As a result we’ve begun the process of migrating our custom i18n code to Dojo’s API, away from the custom, backend dependent code we’ve used in the past. We’ve also started streamlining our use of Dojo’s topic APIs to make our code easier to read and understand. Both these processes are works in progress, so keep an eye on this space for more detailed information in the future.

Several components have also seen essentially complete overhauls, most prominently the XMLHttpRequest wrappers and Dijit, the full featured HTML/CSS UI toolkit built on Dojo Core. Instead of using dojo.io.bind and passing callback functions, method, and header information dojo.xhrGet, dojo.xhrPost and a handful of other methods accept a variety of arguments, make HTTP requests and return dojo.Deferred objects. This return value, a port of the asynchronous task management API introduced by Python’s Twisted networking library, provides an easy way for developers to manage complex sets of asynchronous actions like server requests. Since our Web UI data APIs already used dojo.Deferred internally, this change led to a very nice code reduction.

Dojo’s user interface building API, Dijit, has been greatly improved since Dojo 0.4. In addition to moving to its own namespace as part of Dojo’s overall API flattening, Dijit is better streamlined, better tested, and easier to use. A number of Chandler Server UI components have been ported to the Dijit APIs, and are, as a result, better tested, more modular, and closer to being embeddable outside of our Web UI.

The Dojo team has also been hard at work putting together the next generation of Javascript tools to support high performance rich applications on top of the Open Web. Two of these tools are already finding their way into heavy use within our code base, and are poised to become critical pieces of our infrastructure over the next year.

The first, dojo.data, is “uniform data access layer” that allows UI components to be built without worrying about backend data formats. Our user administration interface has been essentially completely rewritten, but required almost no new UI code. All we had to do was implement a dojo.data store on top of the Cosmo Management Protocol (CMP) and hook it up to Dojo’s Grid widget to get full in-place user field editing, “infinite scrolling” for handling large numbers of users and a handful of other goodies. While our end-user calendar and item list UIs have not been moved to this API, the ongoing web widget project is being built on a new dojo.data store that we hope to eventually integrate into our current UI.

The second piece of new functionality that I’m excited about is dojo.query. This do-it-all CSS query function is the go-to guy for finding pieces of DOM to manipulate. The beauty of this and other query functions is that they are based on features most web developers eventually expect to be supported natively by all major web browsers. By allowing developers to start using these features now we can build advanced web applications that will get trivially more performant with time, and motivate browser developers to continue implementing this critical functionality.

In addition to improving the tools we use to build our Web UI, Dojo’s 1.0 line has introduced some major infrastructure improvements in the form of a DOH, a new Dojo-independent testing harness, and a from-scratch rewrite of the Dojo build system. We’ve managed to port all of our tests to DOH by writing some wrappers to avoid a completely rewrite, which has allowed us to take advantage of the very nice test harness bundled with Dojo. Nearly as important as this test framework is the build system that plays a key role in transforming over 1MB of Javascript into a much more digestible 138K loaded in several different stages. The Dojo 1.0 line makes this process much cleaner and easy to understand, as well as offering advanced functionality like layering, which allows us to break our Javascript into large chunks appropriate to different pieces of our UI.

Dojo has been an integral part of our project to build a new kind of information and knowledge management ecosystem and we are lucky to be able to rely on a vibrant community of developers producing a first class piece of software. If you’re interested in digging deeper and helping us integrate even more of the exciting new functionality provided in its latest release, Dojo 1.1, please don’t hesitate to ask questions on our development list, or via IRC on irc.freenode.net in the #cosmo channel.

Chandler Server is a server and Ajax web UI for managing and sharing calendars, events, and tasks. It implements open data standards including CalDAV, WebDAV, Atom, and Atompub.

This release primarily consists of an update to Dojo, the Javascript toolkit used to build the Chandler Server Web UI. Dojo’s 0.9 release was essentially a complete rewrite, and involved a large number of core API changes. Changes to our codebase have been similarly numerous. We are currently using Dojo 1.0.2, and do not anticipate upgrades with as significant consequences in the future.

More information on Dojo, including comphrehensive information about changes introduced in its 0.9 release, can be found at:

http://dojotoolkit.org

Chandler Server 0.14.0 is available for download as a ready-to-run bundle at:

http://chandlerproject.org/serverdownload

and the source code is available from subversion at:

http://svn.osafoundation.org/server/cosmo/tags/rel_0.14.0

Send us feedback at the open mailing list (no subscription required):

chandler-users@osafoundation.org

We look forward to hearing from you!

The bugs fixed in this release include:

• #11607 Upgrade to Dojo 1.0
• #8499 Subscribe/unsubscribe to a collection on web UI
• #11351 Move client collection addition/deletion to atom api

As we have in the past, OSAF will be participating in SoC as a mentoring organization this year. A full list of projects we believe will be both useful to the project in the long term and stand a high chance of being included in our code base in the short run can be found here, but as in past years outside proposals are more than welcome.

Comprehensive information about this year’s program, including important bits like eligibility and application instructions can be found on the the official FAQ. Student applications will be accepted from March 24 - March 31, so now is the time to find a project and put together a solid proposal!

As always, feel free to ask on one of the Chandler Project mailing lists or in #cosmo or #chandler on irc.freenode.net for more information.

I’m originally from a small town about 45 minutes outside of Portland, Maine. My first brush with software development came during the summer of 2006 when, alongside a 6 day-a-week summer camp job, I participated in Google’s inaugural Summer of Code program. My project for the summer found me working with the GNOME Project implementing an experimental “panel extension” system.

I found Chandler while looking for a Linux calendaring client during my senior year at Williams College and after an internship on the Desktop team working on a project to better integrate the Twisted IMAP server into Chandler I was hired full-time as a server/ web front-end developer.

Most of my work since then has straddled HTTP, working mostly at the protocol level on the server and client side, with occasional forays down into the depths of our database layer and up to the shallow waters of user interface implementation. Most recently I’ve been updating our JavaScript code to use the 1.0 release of the Dojo toolkit.

A second project I’ve worked on recently (alluded to in the title of this post) is the first of what I hope to be a series of interesting hacks designed to expand Chandler into the maze of nooks and crannies that is contemporary personal information management. One of the more important lessons I’ve learned while working in this space is that everyone has a different system for tracking and managing the various things they want to accomplish both in work and in life. While semi-standard systems like Chandler’s Triage Workflow and David Allen’s GTD can help, even the most hard-core practitioners will make adjustments to work with their own personal circumstances. As developers of software designed to “serve the way people actually work, independently and together“, I believe it is our job to lead the way in bringing our ecosystem to people’s real needs.

So without further ado, let me introduce chandler.el, a module for interacting with Chandler Server using Emacs, a popular text editing environment. Instructions for installing and using it can be found at the link above. The current implementation is decidedly rough, but is ready for some real world use and feedback.

This offering is definitely on the techie side, but I hope it serves as a proof of concept for a general class of lightweight applications that have the potential to bring Chandler to the system you currently use to track your life. There is currently a discussion on chandler-users@osafoundation.org in which I’ve solicited ideas for more applications like this, please feel free to chime in there or in the comments to this post with yours!

In the future, updates about chandler.el will be posted mainly on my personal blog occident.us alongside information about whatever I happen to be working on or thinking about at the time. If you’re interested in what I do, do check out that space.