J_K9 @ Linux

Mira Groupware: Bring On The Code

Having been almost 3 months since Mira was accepted for hosting on SourceForge, I think it’s time to get the ball rolling. A few friends, developers and I have spent this time wisely, discussing Mira’s architecture and design on the project’s forums, on Skype and elsewhere. I have also spoken to some of the people I see every day, such as a few of my friends (and their friends), to ask them what they would do if they were in my position. Which programming language would they develop a platform like Mira in? Would they choose a client/server model or a centralised server/clients model, and why? How would they change the User Interface if they could? Which Utilities would they like to see become a part of Mira?

I’ve learnt a lot along the way. Building a community for a small project is not too difficult, because development times will be short and as long as the project has a clear and, to potential users, beneficial purpose it will thrive fairly easily, as continues to be the case with HyperGet. However, with a project as large as Mira which will take months, and certainly over a year to reach a state possibly considerable by enterprises and small businesses it is a lot of effort to draw people in and keep them interested along the way, simply because it takes such a long time to see results. With HyperGet, an incomplete but graphically accurate version of the application was available just weeks after its addition to SourceForge. And Mira? It will be a few months before you can build a version of the software which will allow you to see something that looks vaguely like the mockups on your desktop.

The quantity of documentation required before a single line of code is written also rises exponentially. I have been adding to Mira’s Documentation whenever I have been able to, and it is already much larger than the documentation we created before we began developing HyperGet - a 2 page PDF document distributed by email. The problem? It still has a long way to go and a lot of detail to cover before it can be considered ‘ready for primetime’, so to speak, and allow us to begin writing code.

This post is not only to give all of my readers a general idea of how Mira is going - it’s also a call for help. Mira is in need of C++ developers, writers to extend its documentation, software engineers to propose alternative models for features and, as long as you are willing to help, we will almost certainly be able to find a role for you, even if that role is a Spreader of the Word. The Mira Groupware platform will be realised - it’s just a question of how long it takes for that to happen If you’re interested, please contact me or post on Mira’s forums.

MiraGroupware.org: Registered And Ready

Mira Groupware, an Open Source alternative to Groove, now has its very own website which will be its centre of information and development. There you will find Mira’s forum, documentation wiki and hopefully some more community-orientated services in the near future. A nice touch is that MiraGroupware.org will change colour as it progresses through the stages of development: Planning, Alpha, Beta, Pre-Release and Stable, so do keep an eye out for that.

The Planning stage is arguably the most important stage of Mira’s development. It’s where both you and I get to decide what features are implemented by default, how Mira operates, how scalable it will be, how you would like to use it, how you would like it to look and discuss everything relating to its architecture and design. For this reason I encourage you to post what you want Mira to be like in Mira’s forum, so that the developers may consider as many ideas as possible and thus set out the blueprints for the future versions of Mira, and indeed the first.

User interface mockups, such as the one above, are also welcome, as we may then decide which interface is the easiest to use and is also visually appealing so that Mira does not become a bore to operate. It should have a professional look, but it shouldn’t be too dull either.

I have high hopes for Mira, as do others, and I’m sincerely hoping that our efforts will pay off and that, perhaps in a few months or years, you will have an Open Source alternative to Groove which is more scalable, more powerful and more complete than the competition on your desktop.

Mira’s Web Services Are Up

I would like to announce the availability of Mira’s website, wiki, blog and forum which will be temporarily hosted on this website until SourceForge’s shell servers come back up (at which point I shall transfer the software over to Mira’s SourceForge website). Therefore, without further delay, I would like to announce the addition of the following services:

• Mira Homepage

     This page links to Mira’s other services and acts as a front page to introduce Mira to unknowing users who stumble across it.

• Mira Documentation Wiki

     This wiki will act as a repository for our documentation. This is where we instruct users on how to install, update, deploy and use Mira and also put down our decisions on default features, APIs, functionality, and other aspects of Mira’s design (including its user interface) and architecture in detail.

• Mira Blog

     All developers will be able to post on this blog. It will be used to make announcements (in conjunction with the Mira Notification List, mentioned below), to share an opinion or idea or just to capture Mira’s current stage of development.

• Mira Forum

     This is our centre for collaboration: this is where we discuss new features, ideas, development, etc before putting our decisions down in the wiki and it is also where we help users who are in need of it. This forum will, hopefully, bring Mira’s community together (when it gathers one!) and will allow *everyone* to share their opinion on the best route for Mira to take, whether it’s reasonable or not. Please pop over to our forum now to contribute to the discussions and to start your own, if you wish.

• Mira Notification List

     This is a one-way mailing list: subscribe to it and be the first to learn of announcements, news and other aspects of Mira! If you do subscribe, you will receive approximately one email per week to let you know of the current situation and any developments which may have been made during that week.

I will also set up a bug tracker (Trac seems like the best option) when SourceForge’s shell service is back online. I shall also transfer all of the above services over there too.

Please do join in on the discussions in Mira’s forum to help perfect the plans of its architecture and design! If you know a programming language or two and would like to participate in the coding side Mira’s development, please do put yourself forward - we are looking for developers, even though we haven’t decided upon a programming language yet

Announcing Mira Groupware

As I expressed in a previous post, the current Open Source desktop groupware solutions are unsatisfactory - in truth, we don’t have a Groove equivalent which, despite having its faults, is an excellent, albeit proprietary, groupware solution. Thanks to the community’s support and motivation, I subsequently decided to submit this project to SourceForge for hosting under the name “Mira Groupware.”

Great news: Mira has been accepted! However, as SourceForge’s shell service is currently down for “unplanned maintenance,” I cannot upload the wiki, forum and other software to Mira’s new website until the shell service is brought back up.

For the uninitiated, please read my first post about this project and the following presentation which I have put together to introduce you to Mira and its planned features and to demonstrate why such a solution would be helpful in a myriad of situations:

If you are interested in a groupware solution and are looking for features which you have not been able to find in other solutions, or you are particularly impressed by some of their feature implementations, then please do let us know by leaving a comment at the end of this post!

Speaking of comments, I have just written a small PHP application which will act as a sort of ‘one-way mailing list’ to keep you informed of what is happening with Mira and where it is going. Please note that you will be subscribed to the Mira Groupware Notification List if you leave a comment on this page, but you may unsubscribe if you wish at the click of a button (or simply state that you would not like to be subscribed in your comment).

Mira is also looking for developers - it doesn’t matter which languages you know, as the language that Mira will be coded in has not yet been decided! However, if you share the same passion as I do for an easy-to-use, extensible, feature-rich Open Source groupware solution then please do leave a post below and contribute to the wiki when it is set up. And don’t worry about having to check Mira’s website every hour or so waiting for the wiki to be set up - if you allow me to subscribe you to the Notification List, you will be notified as soon as it is ready!

Mira Groupware: Pending Review

Due to the need which has been expressed for a powerful, extensible, easy-to-use Open Source client/server groupware platform (that is certainly a mouthful!), I have submitted the project, designed to compete with existing platforms such as Groove (as explained here), to SourceForge.net for hosting under the name “Mira Groupware.” Here are the details of the submission:

Project submission:

Created:
2007-02-14 18:48

Last modified:
2007-02-14 19:13

Submitter:
J_K9 (j_k9)

Project type:
An Open Source Software Project

UNIX name:
mira

Descriptive name:
Mira Groupware

Public description:
This is an Open Source Groupware platform designed to have powerful project management and collaboration capabilities and yet still be easy-to-use and have an intuitive interface.

Trove categorisation:

• License :: OSI-Approved Open Source :: GNU General Public License (GPL)
• Intended Audience :: by End-User Class :: Advanced End Users
• Intended Audience :: by End-User Class :: Developers
• Development Status :: 1 - Planning
• Topic :: Communications
• Topic :: Office/Business :: Enterprise
• Topic :: Office/Business :: Project Management
• Topic :: Software Development
• Operating System :: Grouping and Descriptive Categories :: OS Independent (Written in an interpreted language)

Registration description:
The Mira Groupware platform is an Open Source collaboration platform which may be used primarily in organisations and enterprises for project management or as a means of organised communication between people from around the world. It will use a client/server model; the client will be an Internet-enabled graphical desktop application, and the server will be a command-line application which may be run as a daemon (and may possibly have a web administration interface so that its settings may be changed remotely).

Mira will be designed from the ground-up to be easy-to-use and administer. It will sport features such as shared and private calendars, filesharing (as a layer on top of a version control system such as CVS or SVN), both chat (instant messaging, possibly built upon Jabber) and email-like messaging, a shared online whiteboard, and have many other collaboration features. It will allow users to work on their local content offline and then resync with the server when they are next online. Any conflicts will either be resolved or made apparent by the server.

It will also be extensible as it will allow third-party plugins to be created and used to improve its collaboration features.

For more information, please see the following webpage: click here

Current status:
Pending review

The UNIX and Descriptive names, Public description and Trove categorisation may later be changed, so it’s not too problematic if they don’t quite fit the project at the moment (although I think they’re fairly suitable).The Registration description does not go into a lot of depth but does describe some of the aims of the project, so hopefully it will all be read and taken in. If I had written too little, the reviewer may have thought that there was not enough motivation behind the project, and if I had written an essay he or she may just have skimmed over it, so I’m hoping that the length and content will please the reviewer!

I will announce the reviewer’s comment and whether it is accepted as soon as the project’s registration page is updated. Until then, please continue to share your thoughts on this project in the comments section of the original proposition: whether it will be built on top of Lucane or started afresh in a certain language (which), how you imagine certain aspects of the application, what improvements you would like to see in existing solutions, etc. Thank you!

Proposing An Open Source Groove Alternative

Groove is a software initially developed by Groove Networks and now owned and developed by Microsoft as a component of the Office 2007 Enterprise suite. It is a project management application which uses the client-server model and integrates chat, filesharing, calendar, discussion, picture sharing, and is also extensible in that third party tools can be integrated to improve the experience. In Groove, a Workspace may be created and Groove members may be invited to join that Workspace and, if and when they join, they will be set a role in that project by the Workspace’s Manager. It encrypts files in that Workspace on-the-fly so as to maintain the confidentiality of the data and, following the client-server model, each member of the Workspace downloads a synced version of the Workspace’s files and other data for their perusal and modification offline. For more information on how Groove works, see this TechNet article. The only feature that the Groove project management software lacks is a good version control system - and, unfortunately, it is closed-source (proprietary) software.

And good version control systems are exactly what Open Source has: Concurrent Versions System (CVS), Subversion (SVN), Git, etc. However, we don’t have a tool which integrates (or acts as a layer on top of) these excellent systems with collaboration modules to produce an outstanding and free project management system.

Plone (content management)…..would handle most of the online
collaboration…. and dotProject (for project management)

The above quote is taken from a post to a mailing list about Open Source alternatives to Groove, and the situation now is as dire as it was one and a half years ago. Plone and dotProject are excellent projects, but they are not, together, a suitable replacement for an all-in-one project management solution such as Groove. The fact that Plone and dotProject are web-based makes them even less a suitable replacement, especially in our current day, for the interface is slower and is more detached from the desktop. One much also be online to use those solutions, whereas you can alter your Workspace’s files offline and then synchronise them with the server the next time you’re online with Groove.

What we need to do is build an Open Source replacement for Groove. Groove is good, but it is not without its faults. I believe that the Open Source community can build an application which either provides a layer of collaboration over an existing version control system or which integrates one (or multiple) of those systems which will not only rival Groove, but which will be better, faster (Groove’s interface, although minimalistic, is a little slow) and more secure. Here are some of the features or characteristics I envisage:

• User-Friendly and Intuitive Interface

  Take a close look at Groove’s interface. In fact, download a trial copy of Groove on a Windows machine (if you have access to one - if not, please look around or ask me for screenshots) and check it out for yourself. Also scroll down Marc Olson’s Groove 2007 Blog, which will give you a deeper insight into Groove’s functionality.

  Despite Groove’s user-intuitiveness, there are some features which are confusing or unsatisfactory. Resolving name conflicts is a nuisance, because you can’t directly remove one of the names. The version control system employed by Groove is poor at best, although I like the way it notifies you of updates within tools in a Workspace (as explained here). We need to make it even simpler.

  If there is sufficient interest in this application, I shall create a few mockups of its interface, although Groove’s interface is an excellent starting point.

• Support For The Mainstream Version Control Systems

  Ideally, this application would be able to run on top of CVS, SVN and Git by making each different version control system a separate ‘tool’ (to use Groove’s terminology). Thus, to create an SVN-managed repository, for example, all the Workspace’s Manager would need to do is add a ‘Subversion Tool’ to the Workspace.

  Using the method explained above, supporting multiple version control systems would not be as complex as it might first have seemed.

• Extensible And Flexible Design

  An extensible design would allow third party developers to create their own tools which could then be added on to this application to extend its functionality in new and exciting ways. Want a whiteboard to draw things with your fellow developers in real-time? Download and install the tool. Want to implement support for a VoIP application so that you can have conference calls with your developers? Download and install the tool.

I have many, many more ideas in mind for this software. Please take a moment to look at Groove if you have the time and, if you like what you see and read, let me know about it and express an interest in watching an improved, Open Source version of this highly useful and productivity-increasing utility become a reality.

If there is sufficient demand for this application, I will recruit a group of developers, set up a SourceForge.net site for the software and set up a donations account to speed up the development process and support the developers. However, you will only ever see this software spring out of my mind and onto your desktops and servers if you provide your support, so please do leave a comment and let me know what you think!

Update: This project has been dubbed “Mira Groupware” and is now pending review for hosting on SourceForge.net!