[ACIP] Introduction to the OSAF project

[Kent S. <sa...@ma...>]

Hi all, as per the discussion in the car today, here's more information 
about the Open Source Application Foundation (OSAF). The web site is 
http://www.osafoundation.org. There's more information about the 
architecture and tools defined for this project at the site.

Shortly, the intent is to make a smart email reader with modules for 
notes, calendars, and much more, with full sharing between users 
without the need of a server (style Outlook and Exchange servers). This 
is header by Mitch Kapor, with engineers such as John Andersson (former 
head of app development at NeXT, Andy Hertzfield, Morgen Sagen (that I 
used to work with at @Home), Dave McCuster, and others.

The framework for this will be based on wxWindows 
(http://www.wxwindows.org), and especially the Python APIs, 
http://wxpython.org). This is a cross-platform framework.

The underlying storage is a combination of RDF information stored as 
Python objects or other objects, the Python object store is based on 
ZODB. The data sharing between objects will be used on the Jabber XML 
protocol. Also, the project will use Gecko as the layout engine for 
HTML and styled text, and the Mozilla editor for text editing.

How does this fit our goals. My take is that this would be an excellent 
cross-platform environment for building various Tibetan tools for 
cross-platform use in future. Many of the tools are of similar nature, 
database access or storage, presentation, data sharing, and so forth. 
The idea behind the OSAF Chandler project is to build an extensive 
framework for more functionality either embedded inside the main 
application, or as applications build with the same framework.

Secondly, by helping out with open source we help others, so that way 
we could help out with giving free tools to other users and developers, 
so that's merit compared with using a proprietary system (not that this 
is OK, as long as our code is totally free).

Thirdly, it would mean fast progress to use a language such as Python 
to build tools, compared with C/C++, and we don't want to use Visual 
Basic...

Anyway, just my views. Feel free to comment. You could always download 
the material from http://wxpython.org (just now it's down as 
sourceforge.net is doing a massive change of material), and play with 
it, and see how well it works with Windows, MacOSX, and Linux 
environments. If problems, file  bugs or even better, make patch 
changes and send them in for approval. Or just learn the APIs to see 
how they work, and if this makes sense. Or then later contribute to the 
OSAF project. If we do smaller applications in parallel with their 
effort, and help out, it would contribute to the OSAF work quite a lot.

It's quite Ok to build Java or C++ based specific  tools, the more 
dharma tools, the better. But this is just one interesting opportunity 
to be part of something in the early days and see how far this could go.

sarva mangalam, Kent