Last week Chandler hit a milestone that we’ve been calling “Preview”. Preview is a coordinated release of the Chandler Desktop application, the Chandler Server (Cosmo), and a free sharing service, Chandler Hub. Chandler Server not only provides calendar and general item sharing services for Chandler Desktop, it also includes an AJAXy UI that implements a decent slice of the functionality of the desktop. We’ll be working to increase the coverage of that slice over time. Chandler Hub is running on top of the Chandler Server software, and anyone who wants to could run a similar service by grabbing the code and installing it.
Over the years, many people have said to me, “let me know when Chandler is usable”. This is your notice that we now consider Chandler usable. The release numbers on the desktop and server are at 0.7 – so we are not saying that Chandler is feature complete, but the current features are usable. I’ve been using the calendar features for quite some time.
There are some important resources that you should take some time to look at, including:
- A revamped vision document
- A “Getting Started Guide“
- Screenshots
- Screencasts
I’d also like to highlight some of the interesting work that has been going on in the various Chandler projects: Brian Moseley has written a few blog posts about the work that he’s done using REST/Atom to provide services for the AJAX Web UI of Chandler Server. Jared Rhine has written a thorough and thoughtful post about what it means to be/run an “open service”. The OSAF QA team has built Windmill, a great tool for testing AJAXy web applications.
There is plenty of stuff going on in the various projects, and a lot of things left to do. We’d love to work with designers, developers, testers, and writers to bring Chandler to its fullest potential.
