After working two months on eGroupWare 2.0 it’s time to give you a
little update on the progress we have made so far.
First of all, we are very thankful for the enormous amount of positive
feedback we got for our effort to increase usability and stability of
eGroupWare.
eGroupWare 2.0 Project Page
We are glad to announce the immediate availability of a site dedicated
to the eGroupWare 2.0 effort:
www.egroupware20.org.
This will be the main platform for information and discussions about
eGroupWare 2.0. We documented quite a lot in the ‘learn’ section so far,
and now we can’t wait that the forum gets filled with life. We hope you
enjoy this platform as much as we do.
Current State
Generally we are amazed by the speed the project developed. We already
passed milestone 1 which we hoped to reach by the end of this year.
With the power of the Zend framework it was quite easy to implement the
database back-end, support for filters and validation of user data. With
the help of Ext-JS it’s also quite easy to build desktop like
applications. So we are glad to say that we have all ingredients to
build a very responsive groupware with an outstanding user-experience.
Great ascent was made in the user-interface. We now have all concepts
ready to create desktop class applications. If you visit the demo please
notice the contextual toolbars with enabled and disabled actions, try
your right mouse-button and be astonished by the speed of paging and
searching.
Many thanks to the Ext-JS team who provided an excellent foundation and
helped out in our process of learning to develop desktop-class
applications.
And guess what? It works in FF, Konqueror, Safari, Opera and IE
A great step forward is the uncoupling of access-control-rights from the
ownership of records we made. With this it’s possible to create shared
folders (e.g. a shared addressbook) and assign access-rights to the
folder, which are valid for each containing item independent from the
rights of a certain creator. We are quite optimistic that administrators
will love this new degree of freedom when modeling a groupware solution.
For data safety we introduced a simple concurrency management, which
rejects saving of records which got changed during the edit process. The
user is asked to review his changes before he attempts to save them.
This is a great advance compared to the current 1.4 approach where the
last one who saves just ‘wins’.
As a final note in this section it’s worth to explain the agile approach
we use for developing. Agile programming means that the software makes
an evolution and has frequent cycles of re-factoring. We evaluate our
main concepts with the help of 3 applications. First the addressbook as
an easy list application. Secondly a calendar which is mainly based on
object composition, and thirdly with a CRM application which relies on
linking of data. In the next weeks we will add a fourth app to this
portfolio, the tasks, to cover all traditional groupware fields.
However, we will wait with more applications until the evolution of
these applications leads to major and well tested main concepts.
What’s Next
We do not only want to create a more usable groupware, we also want to
make eGroupWare more safe and stable. Therefore along with normal day to
day developing for Milestone 2 and 3 we will start with unit-testing and
history logging which was originally considered after Milestone 3.
We think that it is a precondition to have a fully functional history
logging and a more advanced concurrency management, before starting to
integrate interfaces like CalDav and SyncML. In our projects the absence
of this core features in egw1.x has turned out to be one of the major
pitfalls and showstoppers. Currently each record is as it is, and nobody
has an idea how it came to this point which is more than unsatisfactory
especially in large installations.
Database Brand Compatibility
eGroupWare uses PDO as database adapter and Zend_DB as database
abstraction layer. Thus in principle it’s database independent when only
using simple database actions.
However, for a fully featured and performant groupware it’s not adequate
only to use trivial sql statements. In the current egw1.x code we made
enormous efforts to support much database brands. This makes the code
complicated on the one hand, and on the other hand we abandon many great
features of the specific database vendors. But most sadly we have to sum
up honestly, despite these efforts and restrictions, egw1.x only runs
adequate and fully featured with the mysql back-end.
So what lesson do we learn from that for egw2? eGroupWare2.0 is designed
to support multiple back-ends. For accounts this is sql and ldap. For
the addressbook this is sql, ldap and different web-services. For the
calendar its sql and ical-files.
This being said, it’s clear that we see different sql database brands
also as different back-ends. We at Metaways concentrate on the mysql
back-end, as we are a service provider for large scale mysql databases.
We have much mysql knowledge in-house and work closely together with
mysql consultants. Therefor we can write highly optimized and performant
mysql code. The back-end concept gives us the freedom to include support
for other brands when we or others need it. Again these back-ends than
could be highly optimized and performant.
Versioning Strategy
While it’s confusing for users that a version 2.0 exists along the
current 1.x versions we call the effort itself eGroupWare 2.0 and start
with version 0.x. So it should be clear that eGroupWare and eGroupware
2.0 are two different products of the same project.
However the eGroupWare community has not yet officially decided if the
outcome of the eGroupWare 2.0 effort really becomes the logic
replacement for the current egw1.x code-line as a long-term goal.
We plan to request a vote on this topic in the first quarter of 2008. As
we had a lot of positive feedback from the developers community so far,
it’s likely that our plans come true to integrate our effort officially
into the project.
So far for the update, thank you all for the enormous interest in
eGroupWare 2.0. Please understand that we can’t answer any single mail
and therefore send updates like this from time to time.
Your eGroupWare 2.0 team!
What Is eGroupWare2.0?
eGroupWare 2.0 is an effort to increase usability and stability of
eGroupWare, one of the leading open-source groupware projects.
By working on this effort it became clear, that the best strategy for
improving eGroupWare would be a rewrite in a separate code-base like KDE
4 and Typo3 did before.
The eGroupWare 2.0 effort was started by 2 of the 3 most active
eGroupWare developers which currently work full-time on the project. All
this efforts are currently fully backed by Metaways GmbH which pays
these developers.
Contact
Lars Kneschke
CTO OfficeSpot.Net
Metaways Infosystems GmbH
Pickhuben 2-4, D-20457 Hamburg
E-Mail: mailto:l.kneschke@metaways.de
Web: http://www.metaways.de
Tel: +49 (0)40 317031-21
Fax: +49 (0)40 317031-921
Metaways
Metaways GmbH is an internet service company which backs large scale
sites in a fail-safe server environment. One of these sites is
OfficeSpot.Net, which provides the current stable version of eGroupWare
as an ASP solution.
At Metaways more than 20 experienced PHP developers create large scale
web-service solutions for international customers, focused on Typo3,
ZendFramework and eGroupWare in their technical realizations.
Metaways Infosystems GmbH - Sitz: D-22967 Tremsbüttel
Handelsregister: Amtsgericht Ahrensburg HRB 4508
Geschäftsführung: Hermann Thaele, Lüder-H.Thaele
–
Cornelius Weiß
Metaways Infosystems GmbH
Pickhuben 2-4, D-20457 Hamburg
eGroupWare Support: http://www.egroupware-support.net
OfficeSpot.Net Collaboration Server: http://cs.officespot.net
E-Mail: mailto:c.weiss@metaways.de
Web: http://www.metaways.de
Tel: +49 (0)40 317031-45
Fax: +49 (0)40 317031-945
Metaways Infosystems GmbH - Sitz: D-22967 Tremsbüttel
Handelsregister: Amtsgericht Ahrensburg HRB 4508
Geschäftsführung: Hermann Thaele, Lüder-H.Thaele
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