Oren’s Weblog

The other big news today at the Chandler update is that OSAF is planning to build a web-browser interface for Chandler functionality. This project is being called Scooby. The slides Mitch used to talk about it are here.

The idea is that instead of creating a separate version of the desktop Chandler app to support nomadic usage, users could get at calendaring and other Chandler items that reside on a Cosmo server from a browser.

The Scooby software would be something that runs on a web application server (in this case Tomcat) that talks to a Cosmo server on one side, and the web browser on the other.

This is still at a very early stage – I believe Mitch characterized it as “proto-molecular”. Stay tuned for further developments..

Brian Moseley talked to us this morning about the work on designing a server for sharing calendaring and other items. This is a separate, but coordinated, project within OSAF. The server is called Cosmo.

Brian’s presentation slides are here.

It’s interesting to see OSAF move closer over time to a more server-oriented view of the world. Of course, those of us in the CSG have been trying to tell them all along that servers make a lot of sense

Why a sharing server? More than a file server but not a content management service – it’s “content aware”.

Cosmo is being built on the Java/J2EE platform, instead of in Python like Chandler.

They decided to use the Java Content Repository (JCR) as a base, rather than Slide. Apache’s Jackrabbit is the reference implementation, incubating at Apache

– in pre-alpha

– provides core implementation of JCR interfaces.

– stateful repository server

– Analagous to JDBC but non-relational

– allows abstraction of content store from server, unlike Slide

– “Content repository API for Java”

– main query structure is xpath

They’re using the Spring Framework for lots of functionality.

for security they’re using Acegi Security Framework

– built on top of spring

– security of channel?

– where do we send user if unauthenticated logins come in?

– Authentication

– handles role-based authorization and ACL authorization

– secures both the web layer and the JCR repository

Web UI

– struts, jsp,

sitemesh for JSP view layout

– wraps business object components commonly used

tiles – struts subproject for JSP view composition

DAV: Jackrabbit jcr-server

Jacrabbit jcr server provides a simple WebDAV servlet

Cosmo extends jcr-server to:

– incorporate Spring for config and depndency

– secure access to the JCR repository via Acegi

– will implement CalDAV

– will ticket based access control

External Authentication

Mechanisms under consideration: LDAP, SQL, CAS, Shib, others?

Providing a simple Cosmo interface for external auth plugins

Cosmo user management API for synchronizing with external user databases.

There will be an interface for automatically synching accounts with external data sources e.g. with LDAP.

Cosmo 0.2 planned for release with Chandler 0.6. Won’t include external authentication, but will include:

– Account self-management

– ticket-based security

– iCal interop

– CalDAV interop

John Gruber does a brilliant job on his Daring Fireball blog of translating Adobe’s marketing speak in their press release answering questions about the acquisition of Macromedia.

This line particularly rang true to me, where he describes PDF and Flash as

the two leading technologies that irritate people when they’re used in lieu of regular web pages.

I feel exactly that way.

And while we’re at it, how about people who make me open a Word attachment just to read a few lines of plain text?

Ryan Barrett, who works at Google, writes that he’s got a newly nicely formatted of his gmail vs. pine article available.

The bottom line?

I ended up using it for five weeks, and while I eventually switched back to Pine, I liked Gmail a lot more than I expected. It made me question lots of things I took for granted, and showed me that there’s plenty of innovation left in email clients. I’m currently writing patches for Pine to implement the features I miss most from Gmail.

I’m in San Francisco today for an update on Chandler being given for CSG members, who’ve invested a bunch of money into the development for Chandler. I’ll be blogging it during the day.