Buni Meldware Communication Suite

Whoohoo so Meldware Communication Suite 1.0M7 is finally out. I'd like to give you a little tour of what the webmail and webcalendar look like in this release. James is whining at me to get a demo up. I also owe a few people buni.org email addresses ... [More] (we give these out like candy to contributors or people who are interested in propagating the Meldware inside their organization). While I'm getting to that I thought I'd give a little tour... Like those guys in that beer commercial, I like to show people things. This is the Mail/Calendar as it is/was just slightly before the M7 release (there might have been a few tweakies here or there since I took the screenshots). These were downsampled to 800x600 so I hope they look okay! I shrunk them HTML-wise further just so they'd fit on the page, but if you click you'll see the full sized version. This is the login screen. If you need a really extensive explanation...well maybe computers are just not for you okay? This is the main screen where you can see all of your mails. Tom doesn't have any email, isn't that sad? I've resized smaller than the minimum bounds. Ooops? See why I'm trying to hire someone in sales? ;-) You can have multiple aliases. This preference screen lets you pick the default alias to post as. You can also give yourself a cooler display name than your email address. Some people just pick their given name. I set mine to BadazzMutha to intimidate my rivals (even the ones in my head are scared). The timezone selector is just for pretty. We don't really need/use that ATM (it comes from your system timezone). This is the compose screen. The style bar is just for pretty, it doesn't do anything yet. However you can send email with it, that's pretty cool right? This is the main screen again only this time Tom has mail and views it. If you click on the 'lil tab then you'll see a calendar for the month. If you click on a day then you get the daily calendar. Click on an hour and you create an event! You can move he event through time to where you would like it. Remember to click Save (not shown). I have a few issues still with this screen. If you don't know to click the hours then it isn't all that intuitive... If you move an event after you save it you have to edit the description (meaninglessly) in order to enable the save button to save the time change... Presumably these things will be fixed by 1.0M8. After you save the event you'll see the title displayed next to the time. Nice huh? If you got to weekly view (above the right side mini calendar), you'll see the event you created. If you go to monthly view you should see the event you created again. This is the contacts screen. It needs some refactoring. I hate this screen. If you put "*" in the box and click "search" it will find everyone on the server. Then if you select them and click "add selected" they'll appear in your contacts. It is about as intuitive as doing calculus in cuneiform. Hopefully this screen will be fixed up a bit by 1.0M8 (and the query too!). If you click on one of your contacts this screen pops up. Then you can click edit if you like and the labels become fields instead. The CSS isn't properly applied here but its okay :-) Anyhow, I know I'm only supposed to say good things and carry pom poms, not point out the rough edges too. However, I'm a simple software developer not a marketing genius huh? You can see the tremendous progress that this part of Meldware (the most visible) has made in this release. You can only imagine what is up with the actual server (the bulk of our R&D effort)...nah don't imagine...install it baby! Just maybe wait till tomorrow, the server has been a little bit slow today with everyone pegging it for downloads! [Less]

We've managed to get Milestone 7 out the door now which is great. Andy has bestowed 'Beta' status onto the IMAP implementation, which I think acurately reflects the work that has gone into it recently. The main changes for IMAP in M7 include a new ... [More] MIME parser, a new proxy pattern based API for the Mailbox, a complete reimplementation of our ANTLR parser (in fact its not a parser at all, its just a lexer) and a new Search implementation. Its the details of new search that I wanted to bore you with today. The previous implemenation of search was a just a bit naive, it would take in the incoming search terms, load all of the messages in the folder and scan them for any matches. Not particularly efficient, mostly because the search was implemented on the consumer side of the Mailbox API. So whilst in the midst of a 'make the DB do all of the work' rage, I added search to the Mailbox API. The caller simply creates a SearchKey and passes that to the folder proxy that it wants to search. MailboxService service; // Injected Mailbox mailbox = service.createMailboxProxy("alias"); Folder inbox = mailbox.getFolder("INBOX"); SearchKey recentKey = SearchKey.create(SearchKey.RECENT, true); SearchKey sizeKey = SearchKey.create(SearchKey.LARGER, 4096); SearchKey andKey = SearchKey.createAnd(recentKey, sizeKey); Collection<Long> uids = folder.search(andKey, true); The SearchKey is a flyweight that indicates key and value(s) to search for. The Mailbox takes a the keys and creates a number of SearchQuery objects depending on the type of query being issued. Where possible the implementation tries to convert the search into an EJB-QL query so that the heavy lifting for the search is handed off to the database. At the moment the implementation is fairly simple, as multiple search keys will result in multiple queries. At some point I will change the implementation so that it will merge some of the search keys into a single query. Some types of queries can't be merged (specifically text and body searches), but there is all sort of other optimisations that can be done, including reordering the search keys depending on how efficiently a given key can searched for. All in all the IMAP implementation is looking pretty complete. M7 still has a couple of bugs in the bodystruture implemenation (fixed in HEAD) and still requires more testing with clients other than T-Bird. Messages with attachment seem to crash Evolution and Outlook Express doesn't "see" the INBOX. Expect issues like these to be fixed soon. [Less]

We've managed to get Milestone 7 out the door now which is great. Andy has bestowed 'Beta' status onto the IMAP implementation, which I think acurately reflects the work that has gone into it recently. The main changes for IMAP in M7 include a new ... [More] MIME parser, a new proxy pattern based API for the Mailbox, a complete reimplementation of our ANTLR parser (in fact its not a parser at all, its just a lexer) and a new Search implementation. Its the details of new search that I wanted to bore you with today. The previous implemenation of search was a just a bit naive, it would take in the incoming search terms, load all of the messages in the folder and scan them for any matches. Not particularly efficient, mostly because the search was implemented on the consumer side of the Mailbox API. So whilst in the midst of a 'make the DB do all of the work' rage, I added search to the Mailbox API. The caller simply creates a SearchKey and passes that to the folder proxy that it wants to search. MailboxService service; // Injected Mailbox mailbox = service.createMailboxProxy("alias"); Folder inbox = mailbox.getFolder("INBOX"); SearchKey recentKey = SearchKey.create(SearchKey.RECENT, true); SearchKey sizeKey = SearchKey.create(SearchKey.LARGER, 4096); SearchKey andKey = SearchKey.createAnd(recentKey, sizeKey); Collection<Long> uids = folder.search(andKey, true); The SearchKey is a flyweight that indicates key and value(s) to search for. The Mailbox takes a the keys and creates a number of SearchQuery objects depending on the type of query being issued. Where possible the implementation tries to convert the search into an EJB-QL query so that the heavy lifting for the search is handed off to the database. At the moment the implementation is fairly simple, as multiple search keys will result in multiple queries. At some point I will change the implementation so that it will merge some of the search keys into a single query. Some types of queries can't be merged (specifically text and body searches), but there is all sort of other optimisations that can be done, including reordering the search keys depending on how efficiently a given key can searched for. All in all the IMAP implementation is looking pretty complete. M7 still has a couple of bugs in the bodystruture implemenation (fixed in HEAD) and still requires more testing with clients other than T-Bird. Messages with attachment seem to crash Evolution and Outlook Express doesn't "see" the INBOX. Expect issues like these to be fixed soon. [Less]

Whoohoo so Meldware Communication Suite 1.0M7 is finally out. I'd like to give you a little tour of what the webmail and webcalendar look like in this release. James is whining at me to get a demo up. I also owe a few people buni.org email ... [More] addresses (we give these out like candy to contributors or people who are interested in propagating the Meldware inside their organization). While I'm getting to that I thought I'd give a little tour... Like those guys in that beer commercial, I like to show people things. This is the Mail/Calendar as it is/was just slightly before the M7 release (there might have been a few tweakies here or there since I took the screenshots). These were downsampled to 800x600 so I hope they look okay! I shrunk them HTML-wise further just so they'd fit on the page, but if you click you'll see the full sized version. This is the login screen. If you need a really extensive explanation...well maybe computers are just not for you okay? This is the main screen where you can see all of your mails. Tom doesn't have any email, isn't that sad? I've resized smaller than the minimum bounds. Ooops? See why I'm trying to hire someone in sales? ;-) You can have multiple aliases. This preference screen lets you pick the default alias to post as. You can also give yourself a cooler display name than your email address. Some people just pick their given name. I set mine to BadazzMutha to intimidate my rivals (even the ones in my head are scared). The timezone selector is just for pretty. We don't really need/use that ATM (it comes from your system timezone). This is the compose screen. The style bar is just for pretty, it doesn't do anything yet. However you can send email with it, that's pretty cool right? This is the main screen again only this time Tom has mail and views it. If you click on the 'lil tab then you'll see a calendar for the month. If you click on a day then you get the daily calendar. Click on an hour and you create an event! You can move he event through time to where you would like it. Remember to click Save (not shown). I have a few issues still with this screen. If you don't know to click the hours then it isn't all that intuitive... If you move an event after you save it you have to edit the description (meaninglessly) in order to enable the save button to save the time change... Presumably these things will be fixed by 1.0M8. After you save the event you'll see the title displayed next to the time. Nice huh? If you got to weekly view (above the right side mini calendar), you'll see the event you created. If you go to monthly view you should see the event you created again. This is the contacts screen. It needs some refactoring. I hate this screen. If you put "*" in the box and click "search" it will find everyone on the server. Then if you select them and click "add selected" they'll appear in your contacts. It is about as intuitive as doing calculus in cuneiform. Hopefully this screen will be fixed up a bit by 1.0M8 (and the query too!). If you click on one of your contacts this screen pops up. Then you can click edit if you like and the labels become fields instead. The CSS isn't properly applied here but its okay :-) Anyhow, I know I'm only supposed to say good things and carry pom poms, not point out the rough edges too. However, I'm a simple software developer not a marketing genius huh? You can see the tremendous progress that this part of Meldware (the most visible) has made in this release. You can only imagine what is up with the actual server (the bulk of our R&D effort)...nah don't imagine...install it baby! Just maybe wait till tomorrow, the server has been a little bit slow today with everyone pegging it for downloads! [Less]

I think that this new release of our open source groupware package, Buni Meldware Communication Server 1.0M7 is our most significant to date. You can web install it by clicking here or download the signed installation jar here and execute it with ... [More] the Java 5.0 "java -jar" command. This release is our first really usable IMAP release (promoted to BETA quality). As mentioned Mike Barker has been making some great performance leaps in our MIME, IMAP and storage areas. Meanwhile Aron Sogor has integrated a new Flex calendar control by Adobe Flex team member Ely Greenfield into our Web Client. If you're a Flex developer BTW you can build it from our repository and use it separately in your own code (ATM it requires checking out way more of our source than you need but we're working on that). I've added a new Graphical Administration tool which makes creating users and mail lists (among other things) a breeze. Hoshi Seigo and I got downloading attachments working in the webmail and Hoshi also got some of the work of translating the installer to Japanese under way! Needless to say, these are just the highlights! You might notice that the calendar has rolled a few days past our expected release of M7; however, M7 also exceeds its original scope a little bit as well. Mainly this is some extended QA testing on our part and any release of this significance was bound to uncover a few bugs. Thankfully our dogfooding of the release has proven a very effective method for finding the biggest issues. You'll find that the documentation is already available, but will doubtlessly improve in the days to come. I will enjoy chatting with each of you in the forums about Meldware Communication Suite -- more than a pretty face, the first open source groupware that doesn't suck! ;-) [Less]

I think that this new release of our open source groupware package, Buni Meldware Communication Server 1.0M7 is our most significant to date. You can web install it by clicking here or download the signed installation jar here and execute it with ... [More] the Java 5.0 "java -jar" command. This release is our first really usable IMAP release (promoted to BETA quality). As mentioned Mike Barker has been making some great performance leaps in our MIME, IMAP and storage areas. Meanwhile Aron Sogor has integrated a new Flex calendar control by Adobe Flex team member Eli Greenfield into our Web Client. If you're a Flex developer BTW you can build it from our repository and use it separately in your own code (ATM it requires checking out way more of our source than you need but we're working on that). I've added a new Graphical Administration tool which makes creating users and mail lists (among other things) a breeze. Hoshi Seigo and I got downloading attachments working in the webmail and Hoshi also got some of the work of translating the installer to Japanese under way! Needless to say, these are just the highlights! You might notice that the calendar has rolled a few days past our expected release of M7; however, M7 also exceeds its original scope a little bit as well. Mainly this is some extended QA testing on our part and any release of this significance was bound to uncover a few bugs. Thankfully our dogfooding of the release has proven a very effective method for finding the biggest issues. You'll find that the documentation is already available, but will doubtlessly improve in the days to come. I will enjoy chatting with each of you in the forums about Meldware Communication Suite -- more than a pretty face, the first open source groupware that doesn't suck! ;-) [Less]

I have nearly written a build for Flex Scheduling Framework except that I'm burping on how to include the Flex libraries. I discovered Adobe's Flex Ant Tasks. Since the Flex Scheduling Framework is under the BSD license, I was hopeful that the ant ... [More] tasks would be as well. I was dismayed to see this license instead. 2.1.1 No Modifications, No Reverse Engineering. Except to the extent expressly provided in this Agreement, Licensee shall not modify, port, adapt or translate the Software. Licensee shall not reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the source code of the Software. Notwithstanding the foregoing, decompiling the Software is permitted to the extent the laws of Licensee's jurisdiction give Licensee the right to do so to obtain information necessary to render the Software interoperable with other software; provided, however, that Licensee must first request such information from Adobe and Adobe may, in its discretion, either provide such information to Licensee or impose reasonable conditions, including a reasonable fee, on such use of the source code to ensure that Adobe's and its suppliers' proprietary rights in the source code for the Software are protected. The source is included, but I can't modify it and I can't "reverse engineer" it...whatever that means. So I'm afraid to look at them and I'm afraid to use them and... Guys...do you REALLY need this license to protect your secret ant tasks? I guess the syntax of compc is a pretty tightly held secret given its lack of documentation...GRRRRRR. [Less]

I have nearly written a build for Flex Scheduling Framework except that I'm burping on how to include the Flex libraries. I discovered Adobe's Flex Ant Tasks. Since the Flex Scheduling Framework is under the BSD license, I was hopeful that the ant ... [More] tasks would be as well. I was dismayed to see this license instead. 2.1.1 No Modifications, No Reverse Engineering. Except to the extent expressly provided in this Agreement, Licensee shall not modify, port, adapt or translate the Software. Licensee shall not reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the source code of the Software. Notwithstanding the foregoing, decompiling the Software is permitted to the extent the laws of Licensee's jurisdiction give Licensee the right to do so to obtain information necessary to render the Software interoperable with other software; provided, however, that Licensee must first request such information from Adobe and Adobe may, in its discretion, either provide such information to Licensee or impose reasonable conditions, including a reasonable fee, on such use of the source code to ensure that Adobe's and its suppliers' proprietary rights in the source code for the Software are protected. The source is included, but I can't modify it and I can't "reverse engineer" it...whatever that means. So I'm afraid to look at them and I'm afraid to use them and... Guys...do you REALLY need this license to protect your secret ant tasks? I guess the syntax of compc is a pretty tightly held secret given its lack of documentation...GRRRRRR. [Less]

Panto is now integrated into the Meldware code base and a separate release is available. This should now make it into our Milestone 7 release.

So it is no secret that the 1.0 Milestone 7 release is a little late. I knew it probably would be. Mostly we've had lots of bugs pop their head up. I mean we totally reworked the mime parser, imap lexer, web calendar, build, and added a whole new ... [More] module (the administration tool). Not to mention some pretty cool performance tweaks to the data storage layer. We were bound to have some hiccups. NOTHING makes a bigger difference than "dogfooding" ("eating your own dogfood" == using your own software milestones/builds n your day to day work). Meaning, you can test and QA until you are blue in the face....but noting equals putting that thing into practical use. No motivation like it directly affecting your immediate business and staying up till 4am dealing with the fallout from an upgrade problem. We do this so our users don't have to. We put out builds but the non-milestone builds are installed on buni.org and used to drive our development mail list and email accounts. The release will be built on a series of successful milestone releases. the milestone releases are built on a series of not so successful builds :-). Yay for dogfood! [Less]