All Hands Mtg January 6 2004

1. The United Hemispheres magazine has an article on Chandler in it. The article is one of the best summaries of Chandler for a non-technical audience; it's worth looking at. It can be found online at: http://www.hemispheresmagazine.com/cyber/desktop.html .

2. OSAF is hosting an open house for the universities involved with the Westwood program.

3. Mitchell announced that Ducky is moving back to the Community role that was part of her initial job description. As we come to 0.3 and especially 0.4, we're reaching a point where more people can actually participate and it's time for more hands-on attention to community building. So starting immediately, Ducky will be working on community topics with Mitchell.

4. Demos. We had our first try at a few demos showing what has been accomplished in a milestone. Katie and Mitchell have begun discussing how to make these demos accessible to people not in the building. We've got some idea for doing a "follow along" demo during Office Hours. More on this later. For now, I've attempted a brief, rough summary of what we covered.

a. John and Jed showed a document (UI elements) made of blocks built completely on the new architecture. A number of blocks are built already, and a good set of infrastructure has been built to make this work -- Chandler events, notification manager, etc. John described how blocks are almost all data and very little code. This is a departure from traditional UI elements. Katie noted that we're using our data-driven infrastructure for the UI.

John has been working a lot on menu blocks. John also noted that there is a new parcel loader. Blocks are packaged up into parcels and loaded into the repository. Jed described a number of the blocks that currently exist, although they are not all hooked up in the repository. We want to have an example of all of the blocks available so that developers can come to the project and see what blocks are available and what they do.

b. Unit tests from Morgen A goal for this milestone was to have improved and increased unit tests. These are automated. Unit tests are the job of HardHat, a tool Morgen created to help with build processes. HardHat looks for unit tests, then runs them in a Chandler-like environment. Detailed output is sent to the logs. HardHat sends data to a Tinderbox server. Morgen walked through the Tinderbox page showing people how it works. A link to tinderbox can be found yet:

http://builds.osafoundation.org/tinderbox/Chandler/status.html

c. Parcels

Katie showed the content model parcel which is intended to be the definition of base calendar, email, notes, tasks -- the unit of info that the end user works with. We use XSL transforms to take this data and generate HTML pages so that others can view it in a more graceful formal. One can now see an item kind, a list of its attributes, etc.

d. Heikki -- as a proxy for Ted

Ted has been working on test for the repository. There are now tests for almost all of the constructs. Ted also make an RSS feed performance tester users 20 feeds. Creates a good chunk of data. But the RSS feed data should go to the new large object types, but now it goes to XML docs, which isn't quite right.

e. Andy talked about full text indexing and how he plans to integrate this into the Chandler repository.

5. Today's milestone. Tinderbox shows that the build succeeds, but some of the tests fail. We decided since the build runs, we'll proceed with the milestone. We may change this policy later, not but for today's milestone.

-- MitchellBaker - 10 Jan 2004