[Jpim-devel] =?iso-8859-1?Q?Re:_next_release_of_jpim?=

[<fre...@we...>]

Hi Tony,

sorry for my late answer - real life keeping me busy...

I've send a copy to our mailing-list, too. Maybe someone reading this
is interested in helping you out... Don't want to be impolite.


> I have made the same question to the rest of the people working on jpim, and in my opinion an alpha release can be here very soon. I don't have any free time now at all, so it's up to the rest of the people. 
> Another though i had because some people from mailsomething.sf.net are interested in jpim, is Columa to donate the AddressBook code to jpim and sent some people to jpim to work on integration.

You are of course welcome to use our addressbook code, but sadly from a
technical point of view, you can't :-(
Our addressbook makes intensive use of our core framework. The core framework
provides an empty frame, with a couple of menuentries, etc. The addressbook
just plugs itself into the frame and adds its specific menu-entries - same goes
for the toolbar.
We have a plugin-infrastructure we use for our Folder (these are the contact
store's in Columba and can be compared to a mailbox), not talking about
all the other smaller stuff.

So, it will be pretty hard to get something usable for you out of the addressbook
without also using our core infrastructure.


> The best scenario is to give us a few weeks, and then join the development team of jpim and work on testing and integration. A new coder (Stig) has joined the project and will improve jpim a lot, but there is a need of a project leader to put some deadlines, and pull the strings for a while in order to go for an alpha - beta release.
> Tony,
> To summarize: 
>  Code is usable and gets mature. 
>  If your AddressBook moves to jpim, you could get some load off your hands. 
>  A project-leader is required to put some deadlines

We are planning to release 0.12.0 on 20.July. Afterwards we really want to 
move to your stuff. What we need/want is a vcard-parser with the possibility to
load/save it to/from a file and the contact editing dialog.

I don't have the time to lead another project but you should probably consider
to announce a job on the sourceforge site to get people to know that you
need more manpower.

I would recommend you just create a jpim.jar containing your vcard backend
and release it (open-source == release early, release often).

You dialog doesn't use our infrastructure for resource-handling, etc. and the most
important point: it doesn't follow our user-interface guidelines, which makes
it pretty useless for us. I therefore would love to have you allow me to directly 
integrate the sources of your editor-gui in Columba, so that we are able to
apply our changes. Nevertheless we should be able to provide you with bugfix
patches.

Reading in your last message, I heared that Stig from mailtosomething doesn't 
have the time either to
help you out. So, its probably not a good idea to make the jpim project even
bigger in creating a complete addressbook software. Instead I recommend you
concentrate on the vcard/vcalender stuff, which is really needed by many
projects out there. Most people will have problems using your editor because
of the different user-interface guidelines anyway. Nevertheless its a very nice 
proof of concept and people should use this editor as a starting point to
integrate your stuff into their applications.

If you would be able to just release the vcard-parser we could instantly try
to integrate it in Columba. This way we could give you feedback from an
integrators point of view on how to make your library even better. This would
also mean that it would be much more motivating for your team, because
they work to allow an existing application to work out of the box based on
their work. This would also most probably lead to more interaction between our
teams which is a good thing for both of us.

We are creating open-source software, so nobody expects that your libary
works perfectly. Just do a release wether its alpha quality or not and see
what happens :-)

Hope to hear from you soon!

Cheers,
Frederik