[Cosmo-dev] Some questions

[Brian Moseley]

On 9/6/06, Ciny Joy <Ciny.Joy at sun.com> wrote:

>         I briefly browsed through the code and it is my understanding that you
> modified the Tomcat Servlet Engine code to support the additional
> commands required for CalDAV. Is that right? Any specific reason Tomcat
> and for that matter Java was chosen? Any performance impacts that you
> are aware of, if say, you wanted to scale to a million users?

actually we didn't modify tomcat at all. we implemented caldav as
extensions to the jcr-server webdav framework provided by the
jackrabbit project (<http://jackrabbit.apache.org/>).

performance has been a big issue, and we're in the middle of
re-architecting the server to use hibernate and an rdbms rather than
jcr and jackrabbit. we're not far enough along to make real claims
about improved performance, but initial observations are very
promising.

the re-architecture is also driven by the need to scale both
horizontally and vertically to the numbers of users you're talking
about, as well as to take advantage of the operational tools provided
with all major rdbms's. osaf will be hosting a calendar service that
could potentially operate at that scale, and the requirements from
that service are driving this effort.

>         Are you planning to implement scheduling based on the scheduling
> extension draft? What time frame are you looking at for the same?

we'd like to, but we don't have a timeframe in mind yet. osaf staff
will probably not put effort into caldav scheduling in the next year.
we'd be extremely happy for outside contributors to work on caldav
scheduling as soon as possible.

>         By the way, is there a document I can look at with a list of present
> features and upcoming features?

<http://cosmo.osafoundation.org/> and the project wiki at
<http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Projects/CosmoHome>. there is
no concise feature list anywhere, but you can get an idea of our
current level of caldav support by checking out
<http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Projects/CosmoCaldav>.

>         What, if any are the calendar related extra functionalities implemented
> uing CMP?

none- cmp simply allows remote management of user accounts.

>         Do you have a server side implementation of alarm processiong? Or is it
> entirely upto the client?

at the moment it's fully a client responsibility. we've discussed
server side alarm processing, and i think it's still on the table for
some time in the next year, but we haven't made any firm decisions.
again, we'd be happy to collaborate.

generally speaking, we have a lot more ideas and possible features
than the current osaf team can manage in the near future. we're
working on a plan for the next several months, but some features won't
make it on the plan. we'd be extremely happy for others to collaborate
with us in those areas that we can't get to ourselves.

it's also worth noting that while a full implementation of caldav is a
long term goal of the cosmo project, and i personally would love to
see it happen as soon as possible, at least the scheduling part
probably won't happen for a while unless somebody outside osaf steps
in.