Status Update #2 -- March 11, 2003

Mitchell led a discussion of increasing OSAF staff interaction with community members following the upcoming 0.1 release. I would like to jump-start this with some particular activities. One possible example could be to arrange some chat sessions on specific topics related to the 0.1 Release which would be hosted by relevant OSAF staff members. I'll let you know as we get further along here.

OSAF has two new staff members. Ducky Sherwood joined us to work on the email portion of Chandler. She's done with the initial list of possible email features. She is now working from this document to create a requirements document and roadmap for Chandler's email parcel. Ducky will also assist with community-related activities. I'm excited by this, since Ducky has greater visibility into the technical aspects of Chandler than I do and will be able to provide an additional level of communication. As time permits, Ducky is also investigating code documentation packages like epydoc and HappyDoc^? for possible OSAF use. She's gotten some great feedback from the questions she posted to the mailing list, including a pointer to a great comparative review at http://epydoc.sourceforge.net/relatedprojects.html.

Ducky was OSAF's newest member for only a very brief period, since Michael Toy joined us on Monday, 3/10 as our development manager.

Other staff members continue with much the same focus as before: product planning, coding for the 0.1 Release, and infrastructure work. With regard to the upcoming 0.1 release, remember that its look and feel is a place-holder only. We'll focus on this after we have some basic functionality to work with and a UI designer focused on Chandler.

Katie's continuing her work on developing calendar requirements. On the implementation side she's been working on the "month" view, a 7-day columnar view, dragging and dropping calendar events, and basic navigation. Meanwhile John's been working on the "canvas" widget that the calendar parcel needs. Andy's been working on implementing basic functionality for the contacts parcel, including a 3-pane view for contact info, different layouts for different types of contacts (e.g., personal vs. business), query display, and adding and deleting contact methods. Integration between these parcels and the viewer parcel framework is working.

In the UI realm, parcels can now create their own menus, in addition to parcel-independent menus. Rudimentary sidebar functionality is in the works. We want to be sure that Chandler is localizable, so Jed has figured out how to get xrc internationalization working in Chandler and we're testing out string substitution functionality.

Morgen has our Projects.HardHat build system up and running smoothly. We now have automated builds for all 3 platforms, including release and debug versions. Build process now runs and reports results of Chandler-specific unit tests. We also have processes to create tarballs of both binaries and source code for all 3 platforms, although there is no installer yet.

Aleks is working on a security infrastructure. He's looking at detailed scenarios of how data sharing/repository replication will work in preparation for how crypto fits into it. He's also arranging a Chandler BOF at the upcoming PyCon in D.C. later this month.

Lou is working on XML parsing and data transfer functions for RAP. He is currently shifting over to use RoadRunner^? over Beepcore-c for better stability.

-- MitchellBaker - 11 Mar 2003