What is Cosmo?

Cosmo is intended for people who want to share files, calendars, events, tasks, contacts, and other sorts of "personal information" between multiple machines and people. It speaks WebDAV now and will eventually support CalDAV. It allows individual resources to be completely private, accessible to specific persons, or available to the entire world. The server includes an HTML user interface for administration and for individual account signup and management.

Cosmo is a sharing server. It is smarter than a garden-variety WebDAV server, because it understands the characteristics of certain types of content (calendars, for instance). This allows the server to present multiple equivalent views of the same resource for different clients (ex. a monolithic iCalendar calendar for Apple iCal, individual iCalendar calendars and events for CalDAV clients like Mozilla Sunbird, and HTML directory indexes for web browsers).

Cosmo is NOT a web-based personal information manager. It is a server that such an application could use to access people's stored information via standard Internet protocols. In fact, a web-based PIM is the purview of the Scooby project.

Cosmo is not a content management system. There is no support for common CMS features such as content editing or workflow. Cosmo simply acts as a mediator between many different types of clients and a content repository.

Cosmo is available under the terms of the Apache Software License, Version 2.0.

Current Release

The current release of Cosmo is 0.1 (05/12/2005). Download it here.

The 0.1 release focused on getting a basic multi-user WebDAV server in place. Future releases will add CalDAV interoperability, support for Chandler-specific features, and design and infrastructure improvements.

This release only supports Unix-like platforms. Windows support will be added in a future release.

There is no access to the source code for this version due to a legacy issue with migrating from CVS to Subversion. All bugs will be fixed as part of the development release (see below). The previously announced 0.1.1 release has been canceled.

Documentation

• Release Notes - (seem to be offline)
• Installation Instructions - (seem to be offline)
• Frequently Asked Questions - (seem to be offline)

Bugs

• 3067 - 403 error when PUTing an update to a resource
• 3068 - apostrophe character not accepted in resource name
• 3069 - 404 when trying to view the detail page for a user with a hyphenated username

Development Release

The development release of Cosmo is 0.2. Download snapshots here. (NOTE: snapshots will not be available until automated builds have been set up.)

The first milestone build, 0.2-1, is available (06/08/2005). This milestone includes an extended user interface, including the ability for users to sign up for and manage their own accounts. Download it here.

Documentation

• 0.2 Planning Page
• Installation Instructions (at src/docs/INSTALL.txt)
• Frequently Asked Questions (at src/docs/FAQ.txt)
• Build Instructions (at src/docs/BUILD.txt)

Source Code Access

• read-only: svn co http://svn.osafoundation.org/server/cosmo/trunk cosmo
• read-write: svn co svn+ssh://svn.osafoundation.org/svn/server/cosmo/trunk cosmo

See SubversionGuidelines for more information about OSAF's Subversion repositories.

Dependencies

Cosmo is built on top of many external frameworks, libraries, and tools. Most are pulled straight from Ibiblio's Maven repository, but some are handled specially:

• OSAF Server Commons, a set of OSAF-authored projects providing utilities for common server tasks and integration with other frameworks and toolsets
• JCR and Jackrabbit, of which we've taken snapshots; when they begin to issue formal releases, we'll use those instead
• A few random libraries that are not on Ibiblio for whatever reason

OSAF maintains its own Maven repository which contains the above and mirrors Ibiblio for the rest of Cosmo's dependencies. It is not a full Ibiblio mirror.

Other Resources

The build is monitored with Tinderbox at http://builds.osafoundation.org/tinderbox/Cosmo/status.html.

Issues are tracked at http://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/ using the Cosmo product.

Questions and problem reports go to cosmo@osafoundation.org.