[board] Minutes from today's meeting

Thu Feb 14 16:23:58 UTC 2008

Hi all,

Unfortunately I didn't arrive on time for the meeting. I wanted to  
give my 2 cents to Horde Board, but since I missed the meeting I'll  
post them here.

Following the meeting's agenda, first an introduction.

For those who don't know me, I'm Nuno Loureiro (MrVi on IRC, the only  
zombie there) and I work for Portugal Telecom / SAPO. I actually  
started using IMP on the very first version (around 1998?) and I have  
been a very sporadic contributor to the project (code-wise).

For the last few years I've been contributing in a different way  
though. DIMP for example, is a result of a SAPO project leaded by me  
on PT's side and developed by some of the Horde Core Developers.  
Since we gave the entire project back to the community, we (SAPO and  
Horde) try to mutually agree on the roadmap of the project, even  
though SAPO has some special needs.

For those who don't know SAPO, SAPO is the Portugal Telecom's ISP. We  
have around 5M email accounts (1M active) and around 6,000  
simultaneous sessions on the Webmail.

Back to the important stuff, I'm happy with the main goals for the  
project that were mentioned in the meeting. I strongly agree with the  
following things discussed in the meeting:
-  making Horde as a developer framework, instead of a groupware  
project;
-  get rid of Horde_Template (my opinion about this - http:// 
blog.sig9.net/2008/01/21/template-engines/) and DataTree (oh yeah);
-  promoting Horde. That's common sense, people must know about Horde  
in order to use it. I guess that once you make Horde as a developer  
framework instead of a groupware project it will attract more  
developers that don't use Horde because they think  of Horde as an  
application instead of a framework. Developer conferences like OSCON  
or PHP Conference are good places to promote Horde. Good  
documentation and the use of hype technologies (ajax, openid, Oauth)  
as well. IMHO, it would be very important to have an excellent  
documentation repository, of every single package, much like http:// 
dev.horde.org/routes/.

Now, my contribution on what I would like the Horde (as a project) to  
be.

I know I have specific needs. Horde applications are very flexible  
(lots of conditions to match the admin's settings and setup) and of  
course that has its weight performance-wise. What I mean is that I  
could reduce a *lot* of code to match my setup, but I understand it's  
necessary since the project is not targeted to ISP's.

So, let's try to itemize the things that I would like to be included  
in the project's roadmap:

- Performance improvements: the most important thing for us is  
performance related . It's getting better and better but of course  
there's still some work to be done. I can announce in advance for  
those who don't know yet, that we are developing a new IMAP PHP  
module (not c-client based) which goal is to use IMAP in a **much  
more efficient way**. I hope that will give a huge step forward on  
IMP/DIMP's performance. Actually a pre-alpha version of the module is  
already done and Michael Slusarz (hi!) will come here in 2 weeks to  
start working on an IMP/DIMP driver for the new module, or at least  
to abstract the IMAP code.

- With DIMP, I guess a new type of Horde applications was born. The  
typical set of applications for a Webmail are Mail, Contacts and  
Calendar. It might be a good idea to package all these 3 applications  
as one and have them to look like one application only (in terms of  
UI). Right now, only DIMP is ready for this set, but soon we'll be  
able to add the Calendars too (born from another SAPO project). Note  
that one important thing here is to have the entire set as one  
application (UI-wise). Right now, we have hacks to include calendar  
and contacts (and preferences?) in a DIMP setup, which doesn't look  
great.

- Virtualhosts: I can bet a lot of installations (ISPs, Hosting  
companies) need to have multiple Webmail layouts (maybe with a  
different logo and colors) based on the host used (URL). That might  
need  different configuration files, different templates, different  
css, different graphics. I still think that the most practical way to  
achieve this is to have a different directory per VH with templates,  
css, graphics and configs inside. One thing for this to work  
flawlessly  is to take out HTML (or layout) code from the framework  
packages or core scripts, basically to follow a MVC model. One  
example of that is Horde_Form.

- Usability issues, again for IMP/DIMP: to reply/forward messages  
with the HTML Editor doesn't really work as expected; the new mime  
lib to abstract unnamed parts. Overall, there are a lot of  
information provided to the user that makes sense for us, advanced  
users, but confuses the newbies.  Horde apps are a set of very  
advanced applications, you have all type of features you could ever  
imagine. Sometimes, it's good to stop implementing new features and  
show the world the features you have and to make certain existing  
features better or more usable instead.

... And I think that's it for now. I hope I'm not misunderstood with  
my points of view. :)

Thanks.

Nuno

On Feb 12, 2008, at 19:45 , Chuck Hagenbuch wrote:

> Hi all-
>
> Attached are text and html format minutes from today's meeting. I  
> know a few people were planning on following up here with ideas or  
> questions, about conferences and more. I'm looking forward to  
> hearing from all of you.
>
> Regards,
> -chuck<board_minutes-20080212.txt><board_minutes-20080212.html>__
> board mailing list
> Frequently Asked Questions: http://horde.org/faq/
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----
Nuno Loureiro <nuno at co.sapo.pt>
PTMail - DTP/APS/UNX - PT.COM - Portugal Telecom

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