my 2 cents

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, 3] .

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 [4] 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 [5]. 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] eGW+administrator+decisions
[2] SVN repository viewer
[3] Tine 2.0 changelog
[4] Tine 2.0 demo
[5] Roadmap for Tine_2.0