Webical Development

New caldav plugin release

ivo@func.nl (Ivo van Dongen) — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 18:14:34 +0100

Since the first release of webical's caldav plugin wasn't to usefull I've refactored it a lot and tested it with a couple of
caldav servers. At the moment the following servers are tested:

- Chandler projects hub.
- Chandler desktop 0.7.1.
- Apple calendar server on linux.
- Really Simple CalDav Server 0.9.1.

They all seem to work fine, except for RSCDS. This server seems to return wrong events when viewing in the day view.
A bug has been reported.

This release also includes Etag support. This enables webical to check for changes before updating/deleting an event. At the moment this isn't handled nicely in the frontend yet, but I hope to fix this in a next release
of webical itself.

The refactoring has lead to a lot of small improvement, one of which is pre-caching of event paths and etags which greatly speeds
up the whole plugin on editing/removing events. I hope I worked out most imperfections from the first release, but please help
me test it to improve it a bit more.

Download it here!

Upcoming features:
- Optimization (message size & compression)
- Timezone support (are ignored atm)
- Settings (for http headers, caching and such)

Webical 0.4.1 released

mattijs@func.nl (Mattijs Hoitink) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:52:58 +0100

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

Migration to Google Code is complete

zoran@func.nl (Zoran Kovačević) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:43:39 +0100

Yesterday we finished relocating our old project site at SourceForge to the new one at Google Code.

All relevant wiki entries have been moved. If there are important topics that you miss, please check out the old wiki and move them to the new wiki.

Demo is working again

zoran@func.nl (Zoran Kovačević) — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 22:09:40 +0100

I have fixed the demo server. Someone forgot to update the SQL cleaning script that overwrites the database every night

Webical 0.4

mattijs@func.nl (Mattijs Hoitink) — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 17:20:52 +0100

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.

Webical 0.4-rc1

mattijs@func.nl (Mattijs Hoitink) — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 16:10:45 +0100

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.

Temporary nightly build

mattijs@func.nl (Mattijs Hoitink) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 16:56:11 +0100

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

Release and development process

mattijs@func.nl (Mattijs Hoitink) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 10:13:37 +0100

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.

Screenshots of upcoming release

zoran@func.nl (Zoran Kovačević) — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:24:54 +0100

The next Webical release will be out Real Soon Now. Below are two new screenshots of week and month view. Until that time, please check out and build the trunk to see it in action.

How skinnable is Webical?

mattijs@func.nl (Mattijs Hoitink) — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 16:52:03 +0100

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.

Skinning Webical is quite easy (but I have experience in front-end
development). I immidiately saw some changes in version 0.2 and 0.3. This has
mainly to do with element id's being different (better) in 0.3. Where
some elements, like the date switcher or the date picker would have a different id in every view (day, week and month view) in version 0.2, they have the same id in version 0.3. This makes styling a lot easier.

I guess the change in id's is part of the upgrade to wicket 1.3 (not 100% sure). I hope to refactor some more markup id's during the refactor phases to make styling even easier. And ultimately, there will have to be a skinning system in webical, but that's something for the future (even though I placed it on my tasklist).

If you want to check out the Google Calendar skin you will first have to download the greasemonkey plugin from the firefox addons page.

Once greasemonkey is installed, install this script and greasemonkey will do the rest. The script works in both version 0.2 and the development version. I have to say I created the script for the development version, but put some fallbacks in it for the demo.

After the script is installed, visit demo.webical.org and log in. You can see that Webical will look (something) like Google Calendar. A note has to be made that this is only a test and a showcase from me, so the skin will not cover the whole application and certainly is'nt perfect. The demo may also seem slow, as a lot of rendering has to be (re)done by firefox.

To disable greasemonkey, click on the monkey in the lower right corner of firefox.

Let me know what you think of the style

Increment 1

mattijs@func.nl (Mattijs Hoitink) — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 17:40:45 +0100

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.

Project structure refactored, new maven repository and more

ivo@func.nl (Ivo van Dongen) — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 13:22:07 +0200

A couple of weeks ago I suggested to support some additional services to make plugin development easier. Now I think we've come a long way. What's changed:

The project structure is revised. We now have a parent project with two modules; webical-core (the jar plugin developers can depend on) and webical-war (This is the main artifact)
We now have a snapshots maven repository. Nightly snapshots will be deployed here (including release versions of the war). We're investigating the possibility to deploy releases to the central maven repository
The xsd is available online as well for reference by the plugin developers
I've committed my first efforts in creating a caldav backend provider for webical. This is available in our new webical-plugin project's repository. Check it out!

Now these issues have been addressed I can finally continue with the plugin framework again.

Nightly build demo

zoran@func.nl (Zoran Kovačević) — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 13:01:32 +0200

As of now, the nightly build is deployed to http://nightly.webical.org. Follow the progress!

Wicket upgrade

mattijs@func.nl (Mattijs Hoitink) — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 16:05:49 +0200

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.

New project: Webical Plugins

ivo@func.nl (Ivo van Dongen) — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 09:39:49 +0200

Since the pluginframework is getting into shape and the first plugin is under heavy development I've started up a new project to house our plugin efforts. One of the main reasons behind setting up a separate project is a clean separation in svn, I've noticed that many projects have a polluted repository because they try to incorporate all sub-projects into it. A separate repository also gives the opportunity to be somewhat more lenient with commit rights, it's not my intention to keep this reserved for webical developers alone. It also gives a separate tracker, forum and more.

The project can be found at sourceforge I'll check in the first plugin (a CalDav provider) as soon as possible. If anyone is interested in joining the effort just drop a note on the developers mailinglist (The same goes for Webical itself btw).