New faces and projects
One developer quit, three joined, and a lot of new projects have been started recently. Here's a roundup of what happened the last few weeks.
The LDAP browser is dead, long live the LDAP browser
Unfortunately, the Summer of Code student that started working on an LDAP browser and management application had to quit his project because he couldn't handle the workload anymore. But no more than one day after his announcement, the two Bens already picked it up and promised to continue the development. That leads us to the next topic.
Who else?
Ben "1" Chavet is already a long time member of the Horde developer crew, working on LDAP and Procmail stuff, on Trean, the bookmark application, and gives a hand on server administration. Ben "2" Klang joined us a few weeks ago and already impressed us with lots of patches all-around, has been reviving Vilma, the mail server manager, and works on the aforementioned LDAP browser and Beatnik, a DNS management tool.
Then we have Duck from Slovenia who is like in a development rage at the moment. His company Obala d.o.o. is building parts of its business on Horde and he has already contributed patches and translations in the past. Now he has taken over Merk, the Horde shop system, and contributed Minerva, an invoicing solution, Gulliver, a mileage tracking tool, Tinydns, another DNS manager that is going to be merged with Beatnik, and a few currency and tax related libraries. He is also working a lot on some next generation Horde Framework libraries that we are going to use in Horde 4 and that have partially been showcased by Chuck Hagenbuch on NYPHPCon 2006.
These libraries are build around Horde_RDO, yet another PHP 5 data objects implementation. There are rumours that Mike Naberezny of Zend Framework fame is going to contribute to these libraries and has already written a bunch of unit tests.
Karsten Fourmont has refactored the SyncML code once again: "The aim of the refactoring was to provide a cleaner seperation between XML parsing, XML creation and actual business logic." he has written in his announcement. With the refactoring comes an improved SyncML specification conformance, initial support for auth-md5 authentication and the upcoming SyncML 1.2 version, and a test environment to simulate synchronization with various clients. The synchronization framework is being tested against the official conformance suite and the results are tracked in the Horde wiki.
Last but not least there are still the remaining Summer of Code students Soumyadip Modak and Luciano Ramalho working on the Horde Live CD and the "Wandering Books" application Groo. And my humble self is working on some scripts to build Horde "bundles", for example "Horde Groupware" which features all groupware applications in one package, an installation script, and almost zero configuration and installation hassle.
