The Chandler Project Blog

Last week I was at Educause for a couple days, part of a panel o CalDAV implementors. I demonstrated Chandler, and indirectly Cosmo too, to show the university IT audience that CalDAV is real and gaining adoption. François Perrault of Oracle did the first demo, showing Outlook with Oracle’s connected installed client-side, putting a calendar onto the Oracle server (not using CalDAV). But then he showed Lightning could pull down that calendar and view it using CalDAV, and add/change events.

For my part of the demo, I brought up Chandler (m6) with a calendar that had previously been pulled from a Cosmo (0.2.1) server and explained this. Then I subscribed to François’s calendar on an Oracle server, and it showed up in a different colour. Finally I subscribed to a third calendar on an RPI version of UW Calendar, adding a third set of events displaying along with the first two calendars. Except for a mysterious glitch where subscribing to the Oracle calendar didn’t work the first or second attempt but did work on the third attempt, it all went rather well.

I attended the FLOSS Extreme Usability Spring II in San Francisco last week.

In the words of the event organizers Blue Oxen and Aspiration:

“Extreme usability is a methodology that incorporates usability in a highly iterative and agile development process and that partners usability practitioners with programmers and users as co-designers and co-developers.”

Unfortunately, we were unable to take Chandler there as a project, but I had a great time working with the folks from CivicCRM. The event lived up to it’s name and was an extremely intense 3 days of whirlwind usability.

I’ve written up a short-ish report of the what our group accomplished at the sprint and the process we “invented” along the way.

The write-up in turn generated some thoughts as to the nature of usability and design, both in general and in practice. In particular, it got me thinking about how the vague and intangible nature of designing software for human beings is better suited to Extremely Rapid and Extremely Iterative design methods than the Somewhat Rapid and Somewhat Iterative approach that I’m used to.

Personal take on What is Extreme Usability?

Broader implications on What is Usability?

I also realized that while here at OSAF, we are priveleged to have such a close and ongoing working relationship between Development and Design, there are still many lessons to be learned about how to make that relationship even better.

I’m looking forward to trying out some of the techniques we experimented with at the sprint, in-house. Perhaps to iron out some of the existing design issues we have as well as to generate new ideas for areas of the UI that are still murky at best. I’d like to gain a better understanding of where Extreme Usability works very well and where it works, not so well.

I thought I had better post my belated impressions of OSCON 2005 soon or I might as well wait until next year.

This was my first trip OSCON and in addition to simply attending, I was pleased to be able to participate in the CALDAV panel. It was very well attended, with standing-room only, demonstrating that there is clearly a great deal of interest around calendaring and interoperability. Due to some technical difficulties, I was the only one able to get a demo up and running and showed off a few sharing scenarios between Chandler and Cosmo which seemed to generate some buzz from the audience. The BOF immediately afterwards meant more time for Q&A where people asked some tough questions about scheduling. I realized how wide reaching calendaring pain goes when one individual spoke up about the specific challenges of managing calendars for booking a concert venue. The only other related session, was a discussion on the complexity of calendar data interchange, the various formats and clients available. Chandler made the list and did pretty well in a comparison of different clients handling of all day events.

In addition to attending the Chandler presentations and BOFs I also registered for the Open Source Business Review which was a special track of panels geared towards the needs of enterprise businesses. Some of these sessions were more informative/relevant than others. In general, I tried to attend a variety of sessions that I thought would be interesting. I was a bit disappointed that there weren’t more sessions geared towards community building or strategies for product adoption.

A few interesting talks worth noting…

Computational Origami by Robert Lang was extremely fascinating. In addition to impressing us with a detailed cuckoo clock made out of a single sheet of paper, he discussed the math and algorithms behind origami and how those can be applied to solve real engineering problems.

Saul Griffith, one of the keynotes, spoke about Howtoons, one-page cartoons showing kids how to build things with ordinary stuff (Turkey Baster Flute, Shockwave Air Cannon). It was an interesting perspective on how we can expose the younger generation to open-source philosophies and collaboration.

Women in Open Source was a also a great panel discussion. I was surprised to learn that less than 2% of the open source community is female which is significantly less than for closed source development. Based on the animated discussion as well as attendance, I suspect this will be a topic covered at future conferences.

Overall, it was educational, fun and I came away with a much better sense of the wide variety of open source projects that are in the works.

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!

The slides for my OSCON talk: Building Your Own Chandler Parcel, are now available.

For more reports on OSCON, you can look at Philippe Bossut’s notes, or my personal blog. Reports from other OSAF OSCON attendees will follow in the days ahead.

OSCON 2005 is next week. This year there will be two OSAF related presentations:

Build Your Own Chandler Parcel
This is tutorial presentation for people who want to get a head start on building extensions for Chandler.

Implementing CALDAV, a New Standard for Sharing Calendar Information over the Internet
This is panel discussion on the CALDAV calendaring standard being developed at the IETF.

In addition we will be participating in a pair of BOF sessions:

Q&A on CalDAV calendar projects from Mozilla, OSAF, Novell (Hula), and RPI

Meet the OSAF Chandler & Cosmo developers

There will be a number of OSAF staff folks at the conference — please don’t be shy!

Long overdue, but here at last…

Andi Vajda and I participated in Europython 2005 this summer. I gave a Chandler presentation, and Andi gave a presentation on PyLucene. Both were reasonably well attended.

I also did an M2Crypto sprint, and while I got a lot done there are still some loose ends before we can do the next M2Crypto release.

We met lots of interesting people and saw interesting presentations. There were some calendar projects presented that we obviously need to take a closer look at.

You can read more in my post to the dev mailing list in here.

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.

OSAF’s Mitch Kapor and Lisa Dusseault participated in an EDUCAUSE Live! session on April 13, 2005. An archive of the session including the slide presentation and audio recording is now available at: http://www.educause.edu/LIVE057

The session reviewed the work that is currently taking place to solve the problem of practical multiplatform sharing of calendar and scheduling data over the Internet. Lisa discussed CalDAV, a proposal she introduced to the IETF standards body to extend the existing WebDAV standard to handle rich event-based data. CalDAV has been very well received and work is currently under way at OSAF, Mozilla, Oracle, Novell (as part of the newly open sourced Hula project), the University of Washington, and other places to implement this new standard in both clients and servers.

The session also discussed CalConnect, a new consortium established to promote interoperable calendar and scheduling standards. In January 2005, CalConnect sponsored an interoperability event where several early versions of clients and servers successfully exchanged calendar information. The hope is that these efforts will lead to open standardization and implementations that will provide end users with the same simplicity in sharing calendars with friends and co-workers that they now enjoy in sharing e-mail messages.

PyCon 2005, the Python conference, 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.