Big Changes Ahead

Our loyal fans may have noticed a flurry of activity in CVS commits and jabook-devel mail. This is due in no small part to the addition of Kevin 'javaclimber' Nilson to the team that was just me. Kevin's knowledge of java far exceeds my own, and it's definitely a good thing.

Some of the changes sparked by him that users should appreciate:

1. Having a fully modular DAO backend rather than have all of jabook tied to Novell classes. This will allow for an easy change to Netscape LDAP classes or even a database backend.

2. Having maps to allow for the use of any schema. jabook 1.0.0 will ship with maps for mozillaOrgPerson and the new mozillaAbPersonAlpha, which is what Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5 will use. It will also read your ~/.jabook/maps dir for any user-supplied maps that you want to use.

3. jabook will now use a tree instead of a list to display contacts. The most important win here is the support of multiple directories, which means smarter categorization of contacts.

4. CSV exporting will be provided for a user-selected group of fields and contacts. I wasn't keen on this until I found out that OpenOffice 2.0 crashes when I try to have it look at my LDAP.

All these and many many more backend-changes like moving to log4j an additions of junit tests to make development much saner.

We don't have an ETA yet as we probably need to define a roadmap of what features will be in what release.

Anyone wishing to be an official translator is welcome, just join the jabook-devel mailing list and introduce yourself!

http://jabook.sourceforge.net