Status update of the Tine 2.0 effort
Two month after reaching milestone 1, we are glad to announce, that we
passed milestone 2 last weekend.
What’s new?
Most noteworthy and surprising for us was the early adaption of our
code-base into the eGroupWare project as official subproject [1]. From
2007-12-18 on the Tine 2.0 source-code is managed via the project’s
svn server [2] .
On request of the developers community we renamed the effort from
"eGroupWare 2.0" into “Tine 2.0” to clarify the current state as a
proposal for the next major release, but not being an eGroupWare
release in this stage. Consequently “Tine” is an acronym for “This is
not eGroupWare”. As the English word ‘tine’ stands for e.g. ‘tine of a
fork’ this fits our self-conception for being the tine of eGroupWare,
dealing with the latest and coolest web-technologies.
From the user’s point of view, milestone 2 brings a simple task
manager and a CRM module. But this is of course only the tip of the
iceberg, as in this stage Tine mostly is about building a framework
for collaboration applications based on a Service Orientated Approach
(SOA).
Building the client entirely in Javascript, getting deployed by the
first browser request brings the exciting Rich Internet Applications
(RIA) world to the user. Having the same user interface concepts in a
web-application as the user already knows from desktop applications,
increases productivity dramatically. Impatient users can convince
themselves in the demo [3] even in this early stage.
Noteworthy technical details
Together with the eGroupWare developers team we worked out a schema
for generalized history logging and concurrency management and
implemented it in the Tine code-base. This is a big step towards
making the software applicable in multiuser environments on the one
hand, and also a preparation for mobile client synchronization
protocols like SyncML and ActiveSync as well as fat-client live
protocols like CalDAV and GroupDAV. The lack of such features is one
of the major drawbacks in terms of data integrity in the old
eGroupWare code-base.
On client side, we started building widgets for common and frequently
used parts. It’s the first step towards a Rapid Application
Development (RAD) framework. Originally this was considered as long
term goal. However, as we got much requests from the eGroupWare 3rd
party developers and ExtJS users community we decided to increase our
priority in this field .
Next Steps
General topic of the 3rd phase is consolidating and documentation of
the code-base. For sure we would also love to implement a great set of
new features and back-end enhancements, but we strongly believe, that
sticking to professional programming paradigms like this, will make
both, the developers and users community, more satisfied with the new
version.
As such there is only little innovation on the plan for milestone 3.
First we need to find solutions for having tight integration of
different independent components. This will be done on the basis of
the existing applications Address-book, Tasks and CRM.
Moreover an implementation of a generalized tagging system could be
found on the roadmap [4]. Aim of this effort is to find a solution
which overcomes the performance and integrity problems we have to face
within the current stable release of eGroupWare.
So far for the update, thank you all for the enormous interest in Tine
2.0. Please keep us provided with your ideas and feedback which help
us redefining collaboration open minded and open sourced.
Your Tine 2.0 dev team
[1] http://www.egroupware.org/index.php?page_name=wiki&wikipage=eGW+administrator+decisions
[2] http://www.egroupware.org/viewvc/?root=tine, http://www.egroupware.org/?page_name=tine_changelog
[3] http://www.tine20.org/demo/
[4] http://www.tine20.org/wiki/index.php/Roadmap_for_Tine_2.0
What Is Tine 2.0?
Tine 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 Tine 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
20457 Hamburg
Germany
E-Mail: c.weiss@metaways.de
Web: http://www.metaways.de
http://www.tine20.org
Jabber: nelius@jabber.tine20.org
Metaways Infosystems GmbH - Sitz: D-22967 Tremsbüttel
Handelsregister: Amtsgericht Ahrensburg HRB 4508
Geschäftsführung: Hermann Thaele, Lüder-H.Thael
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