It turns out that a transcript of the Chandler demo at the O'Reilly Emergent Technologies Conference a few days ago is online. It's a really interesting read so far.
The first thing to note is the navigation framework. We've taken a page from what we've learned from Web browsers, such that every functional area has its own URL, and in fact so does every data item, and in fact every attribute of every data item. To go to a certain View, you can just enter in the URI for that View....
One way of navigating is just to type in the URL of the page. One thing that falls out of that decision is that it's easy to have my best friend, the Back button. This makes it a lot less scary to go somewhere because you always know that you can go back. Having URLs everywhere also makes it easy to do a Home view and bookmarks although we don't have those implemented quite yet.
Jabber is built in as a fundamental component:
We use Jabber as our instant messaging framework in part because it is extremely well designed but also because it's completely open.
We've built a simple little IM client into Chandler, so I can send a message over to Mitch (does). You can see on Mitch's screen, my Roster entry it turns green until Mitch sees the message. (Mitch responds).
The exiting thing is that we can use Jabber not just for instant messaging but also as a framework for all of our sharing stuff.
You can also see that Mitch is making his calendar available. I can go to his calendar (does) and see Mitch's calendar. I can also choose to overlay my calendar on his (does). You can see my appointments in green and Mitch's in beige.
Wow!
This is just a taste of what we hope to have in Chandler in a mature way in Chandler 1.0
The biggest opportunity is allowing people to collaborate easily. Because we're using an instant messaging framework for our base data transport layer, we can work around the complexity of setting up servers. Normally, it's hard to reach people over a network because they change IP addresses all the time, they go behind firewalls, and so on. IM handles all those problems, so piggybacking on IM solves a bunch of problems for us.
We have a Product Roadmap online on our Web site that I encourage you to look at. That has more details about how we're planning on proceeding.
We are going to have a sequence of dot releases every 60 to 90 days. I expect that in the next week to ten days, we'll post a list of what features we want to have in the 0.2 release. We're hoping that in the next year, the most extreme, brave, developers could use it every day.
Q: Can you talk about your development process?
A: There are at least half-a-dozen people on the staff who live/breathe/eat/sleep software design. We've done some structured interviews. The mailing lists and wiki have had some incredibly interesting discussions. Bill Joy said that most of the smart people in the world don't work for you, and we really believe in that... People have come into the project with visions: Ducky has written two books and has thought about email probably more than anyone else on the planet, Andy has thought about agents for a long time, I've been involved with Agenda, and so on. One of the most interesting things for me is to see all the creative vision that has been coming into the project.
Also check out their Product Roadmap.
Sunday, April 27, 2003
Permalink
Feel free to post a comment below. Please see my comment policy.
Formatting Rules (No HTML):