Webical Development

As of now a point release of Webical is available: 0.4.1 (download or demo). This release contains a number of bug fixes and some usability improvements. For a complete changelog visit our changelog wiki page.

This release is also my last (official) work on Webical. My internship at Func. ends today (sadly). I hope I will have the time to work on Webical at home

cheers

I'm happy to announce a new version of Webical was lauched today. With the trunk already tagged a week ago the new demo was finally uploaded today.

New features for this release include:

• user settings
• new datepicker
• improved interface

With this release we also announce a move of our project from sourceforge.net to Google Code. You can check our new project site at http://webical.googlecode.com. The main reason for doing this is the better issue tracker and integrated wiki on google code. We want to use the issue tracker more often, also for internal developer issues and todos.

The release package is available from our new project site as an archive containing a package war, installation files and instructions. All important wiki pages have been transfered to the new wiki and some have been updated. For extended installation instruction see our wiki page How to install Webical. The subversion repository will be moved next week so you can check out the source and build it yourself.

I hope you will all enjoy this new version of webical. We will begin work on version 0.5, with full recurring event support as it's main feature. New feature request are always welcome and can be entered in our new issue tracker.

Today I made release candidate 1 for Webical available. This release candidate contains almost all the functionality that will be in the final 0.4 release.

Originally the final 0.4 release was planned for today, but that target was sadly missed due to unforseen work and complications. Hopefully I will be able to release the 0.4 final next week.

I'm deploying the 0.4-rc1 to the nightly build site today, so it can be tested. Further testing will be done next week, before the final 0.4 is released.

I've uploaded a new snapshot to the nightly build server. Unfortunately the nightly build is still not working properly, so I have to manually upload the snapshots. I hope to fix this soon so a new snapshot will be available every day.

For now, you can watch the snapshot at nightly.webical.org.

cheers

Planning releases is hard. There is often a whole list of functionality to develop, and little time to develop it. So what functionality comes first? What is most important? Are shiny round web 2.0 buttons really needed at this point? etc etc.

Webical development has been going on for quite some time now (almost one year if i'm not mistaken). A lot of functionality has been developed during that time, but there have been very few releases.
Zoran keeps saying the words "Release early release often" (RERO), and after I read a few articles about the RERO startegy it started looking like a strategy that could fit webical development. Although I've been working on webical for a solid 4 months now, I've only produced 1.5 releases (see the mailing list for that) until now. Maybe the short development cycles and more releases will lead to more new users and developers. The users will see faster progress as well as fast issue fixing. The new developers will have more moments to step into the development process to start working on functionality.

That's why I made an effort in putting a roadmap on the wiki, which is my attempt to make the releases of webical more planned and give more insight to people who are waiting for a release with new functionality, or want to participate in developing webical (I know you're out there!).
The roadmap is meant as a discussion on the functionallity webical should have and an attempt to place that functionality on a timeline. Every functionality will initially be put on the wishlist, and then placed in a milestone if we think the functionality is worth developing for use in webical.

Over the next few days I'll try to update the other wiki pages a bit. A lot of pages are outdated and contain functionality that has been finished but did not have a status update on the wiki. I'll try to filter out all the things that have not been finished and put them on the roadmap again so we can attach them to a milestone. I'll be moving some pages around, and hopefully make the wiki easier to read and navigate.

In the end I hope to make the Webical development proces more open so it's easier to see where the project is going. With the wiki cleaned up, it should be easier to maintain and update the wiki so developments of webical can be tracked better through the wiki (but don't stop reading the blog!).

I created a wiki page to discuss the details of what a webical release should be and what has to be done to properly do a release.

I had a little spare time this weekend and I wanted to try out greasemonkey for quite some time. And so I did :), with webical as my testcase. Greasemonkey is a plugin for Firefox which lets you alter html pages just before they are rendered. You can load scripts into greasemonkey and alter the DOM elements on a page.

As a testcase I created a simple Google Calendar skin for Webical. This gave me the oppurtunity to see how the html and css is build in Webical.

Read More

I started work on increment 1, which I planned as part of my internship. The next 3 weeks (including this one) I will be sorting through the application and try to capture it in different UML schemas. After I mapped the whole application (as far as it will go) I'll try to refactor the Month View to prepare it for AJAXification

The past two weeks I managed to get some general refactoring done, including the Event Add/Edit Form, the Calendar Add/Edit Form and the Application Settings Page. These changes are all commited to the svn server.

I hope to fix a few bugs along the way during increment 1, because a whole list of bugs is still open. And they are all assigned to me

Feel free to check my progress at the Developer Wiki. You can find the first version of the schemas here.

Webical recieved a Wicket upgrade last Monday. Webical 0.2 is using Wicket 1.2.6, but future Webical releases will run on Wicket 1.3.0. The current version that Webical is using is 1.3.0-beta3. The new Wicket version has a lot of AJAX improvements which might come in handy. People who are interested can check out the development version of Webical from the SVN repository

Currently I'm busy refactoring Webical. The Event Add/Edit form is my first victim. I'm trying to fix some bugs along the way.