Re: [Jpim-devel] Re: next release of jpim

[Dieter W. <di...@wi...>]

Frederik,


> This was exactly my thought, too. In the future it would be cool for  
> example
> if you concentrate on creating vCalendar/iCalendar backends and for
> the gui-part just provide a couple of calendar widgets which  
> application
> developers can customize and re-use easily. For my part the only  
> problem
> in adding a calendar solution to Columba is just the lack of a good
> vCalendar/iCalendar parser.

Well, vCalendar/iCalendar is still just a vision. For the moment I am  
concentrating on
working out the contact part.


> It would be pretty cool to turn Columba in a complete Workgroup  
> solution
> which won't be possible in the near future without your backend
> libraries ;-)

Basically this was the idea why I started jpim, I am also principal  
author and creator
of jwma, an MVC webmail client.

>>> 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.
>> This should be possible without much problems.
>
> Sounds great!

I have committed my working copy, which includes the latest updates  
(from discussions on the list)
as well as the db package and a serialization based implementation.
Probably this could be useful for your project.

> I don't want to blame anyone. For me it was totally clear that we
> would use your vcard library in Columba. Tony and me, were talking
> about this for some months now and I was asking him several times
> when you are going to release a version usable for Columba. I actually
> moved integration of your stuff to later dates on and on, nevertheless
> a lot of people showed interest in a better addressbook and I always
> told them to wait for the jpim guys...
> Tony also send me screenshots (I actually hosted those screenshots
> on our main news site for a couple of weeks) and he also send me
> his code for re-viewing. So, this was probably a communication
> problem between Tony and you.

I did not quite follow discussions between you and Tony; what I thought  
from his posts to the mailing
list, is that you would like to use his GUI, rather then the library.
jpim is already nicely able to parse and create vCards since quite a  
while.....


I am wondering if you would also prefer some wrapper (proxy pattern) to  
hide the object tree behind a single
simple contact object
(like I use in jwma:  
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/jwma/webmail/src/dtw/ 
webmail/model/JwmaContact.java?rev=1.5&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs- 
markup)
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/jwma/webmail/src/dtw/ 
webmail/model/JwmaContactImpl.java?rev=1.5&content-type=text/ 
vnd.viewcvs-markup
).

I think Stig would have wanted something like this, so if you would  
prefer this too, I could start and think of how to realize it.
Basically I think this should be done on application level, once for  
the specific type of application, but if we can identify a common  
denominator for mail clients, I think we can work on such a package  
(and provide it extra, with dependency on jpim and it's dependencies).

>
> This would be really great :-)
>
Basically I think the stage the CVS is in atm is RC stage.
What is really missing is documentation (other then RFC and javadocs),  
the docs are rather outdated and incomplete.

> Hope to hear from you really soon. I've posted this message to
> columba-devel, too. If you need help I suggest you post a message
> to our list, I've at least one developer in my mind which was
> pretty interested in working on the addressbook stuff. Maybe it
> would be a good idea, to already start working with your code
> on a different branch, to garanty a smooth transition.

I have quite some mail traffic due to lists, so I do not want to join  
yet another mailing list ;)
I would say that your Addressbook implementation could start to work of  
the current HEAD (as I am going to call for release testing).
As a reminder for all, we have adopted jakarta project guidelines, and  
I would like to try and get things running based on these guidelines.

Regards,
Dieter