Integrating Memoranda with Other Soft

[Maciej Wegorkiewicz]

Hello,

I started to look at Memoranda and it seems to be an ideal candidate to integration with my ePortfel software.

Let me explain my problem in more detail:

I am the producer of ePortfel - it is personal finance manager written in Java / Swing. I need some calendaring / scheduling funcionality inside it (i.e. putting events about payments / remainders or something). Now: my users are requesting to put a calendar panel in the application but I think the better way is to integrate my app with more specialized pim software - that way to leave the tasks to programs which can service them the best way - finance management to ePortfel and personal information management to Memoranda.

Now, I think about the solutions like this:

1. It should be possible to show Memoranda calendar / event list / other panels inside other application - more specifically, on other JPanel component.

2. Other application should be able to generate and insert events into Memoranda's calendar. So ePortfel would be able create events that could be seen in Memoranda calendar. For data to be consistent, Memoranda should be able to read data not only from its data files but also from sources of other applications. I imagine that ePortfel keeps data and provides API that Memoranda uses to show ePortfel's events on the calendar. I heard something about iCalendar api or sth maybe it is the standard for such a task.

Is it possible to develop Memoranda in such direction? I would be glad to contribute.

The second issue is licensing. I didn't find license terms on the site and I want to know if I would be able to distribute Memoranda together with ePortfel. ePortfel is freeware product, but we have also extended pro version which is commercial.

Maciek

[Alex Alishevskikh]

regarding 1:

I think, it is possible, because all those are extenders of standard
Swing components (JPanel, JTable etc). Take a look into
net.sf.memoranda.ui package classes, for example, JNCalendar,
EventsTable and others. IMHO, they can be reused with no problems.

regarding 2:

It is possible via calling EventsManager class. Try something like this:

import net.sf.memoranda.EventsManager;
import net.sf.memoranda.EventsScheduler;
import net.sf.memoranda.date.CalendarDate;
import net.sf.memoranda.util.CurrentStorage;
...
EventsManager.createEvent(new CalendarDate(day, month, year), hour,
                              min, text);
CurrentStorage.get().storeEventsManager(); // save changes
EventsScheduler.init(); // start new schedulings
...

> Memoranda should be able to read data not
> only from its data files but also from sources of other
> applications. I heard something about iCalendar api or sth maybe it
> is the standard for such a task.

It is a good idea. The format of data that Memoranda uses depends on
Storage interface implementation. It is enough to develop new Storage
(perhaps, to extend the existing implementation) to Memoranda would be
able to read data in external formats - from files or from another API
calls.

> Is it possible to develop Memoranda in such direction? I would be glad to contribute.

Of course, you are welcome.

> The second issue is licensing.

This is GPL, so the parts of your software which used Memoranda, must be opensourced.

[Maciej Wegorkiewicz]

All is ok, but the main problem is licensing.
It is just impossible for us to opensource a part of application.

So I have a question / proposal:
Memoranda lacks the view in events panel that shows a period of time (like month view in outlook or sth). This is the view I need to embed into ePortfel - it can be simpler than the original in Memoranda. Can you consider developing such a view as JavaBean and distribute it under LGPL license. It would solve my and other apps who want to integrate with Memoranda problems. Also, I can work on development of such a component.