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From: Frederik D. <ma...@fr...> - 2006-02-21 14:36:37
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Hi developers, I'd like to discuss our future direction with you all! First questions we should ask ourselves includes: 1. How do we define groupware or collaboration or pim software? 2. What kind of functionality do we need? Chat/Calendar/File-Sharing/etc. ? 3. If we create a client for several services, what are the existing servers we can communicate with? 4. How much effort should be spend on improving our framework layer, so other components can benefit of it? Here are my thoughts on this: 1. I don't like the term "groupware". I'd rather go with something like collaboration suite or PIM. Its a tool which lets people collaborate. 2. I'd like to see calendar as the most important first. I've added chat because its very easy and adds a more interactive nature to Columba. 3. Our calendar client should be able to upload iCalendar files to a WebDAV server, just like the old Mozilla Mail or Evolution. Additionally, it should support the CalDAV protocol which works nice with Hula Project Server or Cosmo (links can be found in the wiki). 4. I'm not for investing much time in the framework. We should keep things as simple as possible. For example, the plugin framework should only be used to do little things. It should never become a sophisticated framework as seen in Eclipse. Additionally, we should try to stick to basic principles, so new developers can join us easily. For example, history has proven that its usually not a good idea to add an extra abstraction layer on top of Swing. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this! As you might have noticed, I've already started on prototypes for the calendar and chat components. You can find all the documentation here: http://www.columbamail.org/confluence/display/CO/Prototyping Those should be particulary interesting to you: - http://www.columbamail.org/confluence/display/CO/French+Vanilla+Calendar+Prototype - http://www.columbamail.org/confluence/display/CO/Altura+Chat+Client+Prototype So, I hope you give those a try and we end up with a visually and also functionally pleasing prototype which shows off where we are heading to. I would be cool to release those plugins alongside the 1.2 release. This should help us getting more new developers to join us hopefully. The calendar is more interesting for the visual pleasing, the chat client more for the functional side ;-) So, let me know what you have in mind! Cheers, -Frederik |