Another intermediate Horde 4 release for Kolab-Server-2.2.4

Two days later than promised in the revised roadmap there is finally an "intermediate" release of Horde 4 for Kolab ready. With "intermediate" being the euphemistic word for "while it contains the dynamic calender that one is still pretty broken".

To install the release on a Kolab-Server-2.2.4 system the following commands should suffice:

wget http://files.pardus.de/horde4-20110224.sh
sh horde4-20110224.sh 

The usual warnings that went with the first Horde 4 release for Kolab apply for this release as well: Do not consider doing this on a productive server. This is just an early preview. And if you want to be able to see anything useful in the added calendar application you should ensure the user you log in with already has a calendar folder and has some data in it.

The state visible in the calendar frontend does not do the changes that happened in the backend any justice. But it can't be helped at the moment: While the Kolab backend for Horde is now largely complete the connection to the various Horde applications still need to be adapted to the changes in the backend.

Goodbye Hudson, hello Jenkins!

The Horde continuous integration setup switched from Hudson to Jenkins today. The switch was nothing I fancied because it meant fixing a number of CI setups that I created in the past months. However,.. with the core developer Kohsuke on the Jenkins team it didn't make much sense to stick to Hudson.

In order to make this switch feel at least somewhat productive I threw some additional updates into the pot. Here is a rough changelog:

• Hudson got switched to Jenkins so the former "hudson-install" repository was renamed to "jenkins-install"
• The PHP toolset for the continuous integration setup changed its name from "php-hudson-tools" to "php-ci-tools"
• phploc was added to the toolbox and most other tools in the set were upgraded.
• In addition I imported the latest changes from Sebastian Bergmanns Jenkins template into the horde-support repository. Thus we have two new graphics and some new plots for the jobs on http://ci.horde.org
.

IMAP capabilities of the Apache Zeta "Mail" component

I have been quite busy on the Horde Kolab_Storage component these past weeks. That involved working with four different PHP IMAP libraries:

• PHP IMAP extension
• PEAR Net_Imap
• Horde Imap_Client
• Roundcube IMAP

I will definitely summarize the results here at a later point as there are many IMAP and also PHP specific IMAP lessons to be shared.

Right now I was pondering over the Apache Zeta "Mail" component though. It is great that it is available as a stand alone component. And I know it has been described as "Doing mail right". Which it may do.

But when it comes to "Doing mail over IMAP right" I must admit that I'm not so certain. The code seems to be very weak in terms of IMAP capabilities and it apparently supports only a tiny fraction of the complexity the IMAP protocol offers. A complexity that is needed however to perform mail access in an efficient way. And a complexity that is also required for getting Kolab data access right.

What I would like to know is if my quick browsing of the code gave me the right impression. Is there anyone out there saying that the Zeta Apache "Mail" component can actually be efficient when dealing with IMAP? If so I would make the effort in adding another backend driver to Kolab_Storage and include this one in the comparison that will eventually result from the recent Kolab_Storage refactorings.

Horde 4 presentation at CeBIT 2011

Next month CeBIT 2011 will start and there will be a short presentation about Horde 4 at the Open Source Forum. It is scheduled for 2nd March 2011 at 16:45.

In case anyone wants to meet with developers from the Horde team during that day or around that day, some of us should be available in Hannover. Hope to see you there!

Edit: The schedule of talks for the Open Source Forum

Horde 4/Kolab road map update

The roadmap for Horde 4/Kolab that was published in November needs some adjustments. This represents an updated version:

• [06.12.10] COMPLETED - Horde 4 Portal + Mail
• [22.02.11] Horde 4 Calendar (alpha)
• [22.03.11] Horde 4 Addressbook, Notes, Tasks (beta)
• [12.04.11] Horde 4/Kolab Final

There were several factors that made the corrections necessary:

• The Horde/Kolab integration machinery needs some more work to allow using the new Horde 4 IMAP capabilites to the full extent in order to benefit from a major performance boost. This delays the release of the calendar.
• The number of pre-releases initially planned was just too high and needed to be reduced. This joins the releases of the other applications.
• The Horde development team decided on a final release date for Horde 4 so it is now possible to add a release date for the first stable Horde 4/Kolab release.
• Releases were switched to Tuesdays.

You are encouraged to watch the Horde commit stream. There are a lot of Kolab related commits flying by at the moment. More on the changes soon.

Ubuntu based Kolab-Server on EC2

During the last two years p@rdus published the new Kolab Server versions as ready-to-go Amazon EC2 images. These images were always based on Gentoo.

This base platform has recently been exchanged with Ubuntu as the underlying distribution. Since yesterday there is now a Kolab-Server-2.2.4 available as an image to be started and used for quick testing. You can expect all upcoming server version to be also based on Ubuntu. This does of course include the Kolab-Server-2.3 that will hopefully be released soon.

Instructions on how to use the Kolab Server images can be found in the Kolab wiki.

Horde Project Newsletter

The date for the next Horde4 release is drawing nearer and we felt it makes sense to provide another news channel for the Horde Project.

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