Status Update Number 7 -- June 25 2003

1. Design work.

We're still deep in the design phase, making incremental progress on the key infrastructural elements. Brian is working on creating a formal representation of the data model. Once it exists we'll circulate it. Right now we have notes of various discussions at http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Jungle/DataModelFeatureDetails, but no cohesive design document. Discussions of the "document architecture (formerly the "super-widget" now sometimes know as the "Table and Outline Widget") continue. We'll be focusing on getting the useful parts of these discussions written down soon, as soon as we figure out how to clone Brian's amazing ability to document meetings, discussions and progress. Andy Hertzfeld and Andrew Francis have been working on the API for the notification framework for the event model. It looks like the API is starting to coalesce, and implementation of the Notification Manager http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Chandler/NotificationManagerAPI may start soon.

2. Competitive Anaylsis.

We now have a competitive survey and analysis of email and calendar applications in the Higher Education market. This work has been done primarily by Ed Chao, who's volunteered his help in the project management arena over the summer. Many thanks to Ed.

3. 0.2 scheduling.

We're still working on it, both on a bottoms-up approach of planning specific tasks, and using a top-down approach of estimating general functionality. No breakthrough news.

4. Project pages.

As part of our overall planning and organizational goals, we've decided to create "project pages" for a handful of high-level pieces of chandler (such as calendar, data model and agents). Our first goal is to create an Overview Page, listing the approximately 30 or so areas which together make up our view of Chandler, and to actually create Project Pages for the 5 or 6 most pressing areas. The project pages will ultimately provide an overview of the relevant piece of Chandler. Mtoy will create the Overview page.

5. Email

Ducky is putting together information about existing email libraries so we can figure out whether we'll use existing libraries. We also need to look at the licenses that govern them and make some decisions about our licensing plans. See the Implications of Third Party Licenses doc for a discussion of this. Ducky is also working on estimating the time necessary for getting email working in chandler if we build it all ourselves and if we use existing libraries. Her thinking so far can be found at: http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Jungle/EmailSchedules. If you have releavant experience and something to add about scheduling, then please do so.

6. Implementation

Andi (with an "i") is working away madly. He's working on finalizing the XML format and an implementation of the schema of schemas, and having code in CVS which developers can use to build schemas on. You can now create objects, save them and get them back. Andi has also created a Chandler Data Model Developer Guide can be found at http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Chandler/DataModelDevGuide. The code is new and still unpolished, so expect some surprises:-)

Jed's been working on the ActionsBar^? and item detail view for new windows.

On the build front, Morgen has startes a smoketests page at http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Chandler/SmokeTests and a unit test page at http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Chandler/UnitTests. Morgen has merged the newest wxPython release into the Chandler CVS repository. Morgen also debugged an OS X problem that caused our Mac builds to be broken for a few days. Builds should be OK now.

7. Hiring.

We still have open positions which we need to fill. Many thanks to David Paigen for his assistance with job descriptions, postings and resumes. We've now identified the hiring issue as a "snake": posted positions remain unfilled for long time, we don't have an agreed upon, effective hiring process, and it's a big priority. We decided to review at our hiring process to see if we can do better.

-- MitchellBaker - 26 Jun 2003