The Chandler Project moves forward [LWN.net]

By Forrest Cook
February 12, 2008

The Chandler Project is a small-group collaboration application that is being produced by the non-profit Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF). OSAF was founded by Mitchell Kapor. The foundation's History document reveals some background information. The project has been under development for a number of years. Version 0.1 of Chandler was announced in April, 2003.

From the Chandler FAQ entry on What is Chandler?

Chandler Project is an open source, standards-based personal information manager (PIM) built around small group collaboration and a core set of information management workflows modelled on Inbox usage patterns and David Allen's GTD (Getting Things Done) methodology. See Vision for a more in-depth answer to this question.

Chandler provides an all-inclusive view of personal information, it can operate on notes, email, tasks, appointments, events, contacts, documents and additional personal resources. The Chandler Desktop application provides a single user interface with the ability to enter, view, search, group and share all of the supported types of information. The software is cross-platform, it currently runs on the Linux, Windows and Macintosh platforms. The Chandler software is being distributed under version 2.0 of the Apache Software License.

The Chandler features document explains how the project is arranged:

Chandler consists of a cross-platform (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux) Chandler Desktop application and Chandler Hub, a sharing service and web application. Chandler is open source and standards-based.

The FeatureList document covers the Chandler capabilities in more detail, some screenshots are included. OSAF provides free access to the Chandler Hub, information there is available to any user with an account and a web browser. The Chandler Server provides a central store for locally managed information. There are some demo movies that show Chandler in action, some of the basic Chandler concepts and terms are explained:

Item Chandler has four kinds of items: Note, Message, Task and Event. Chandler items can be of multiple kinds, e.g. Scheduled Tasks and Invitations.
Collection Chandler's primary mechanism for grouping items. Collections can contain items of any kind.
Application Area Chandler has four application areas: Mail, Tasks, Calendar and an all-inclusive All area. Chandler's application areas are a way to filter down your collections by item kind.
Triage Status An attribute on every item that is Chandler's principle mechanism for helping you manage what you're working on. The three triage statuses are NOW, LATER and DONE.
Tickler Alarm A custom alarm you can set on any item to automatically triage that item to NOW at a time you specify.

Two new releases were recently announced, Chandler Desktop 0.7.4 and Chandler Server 0.12.0. The new Chandler Desktop change summary says: "The 0.7.4 release adds a Tip of the day feature and a German translation contributed by a user. The triage status behavior was improved to be more useful. There have been dozens of bug fixes across the application, as well as fixes to the build and testing infrastructures." The new Chandler Server change summary says: "This release supports a standalone WAR form of Cosmo ready to drop in to an existing Tomcat installation. A security issue allowing unauthorized access when a collection had been shared was fixed. A number of smaller bugs have also been fixed for Unicode usernames, error logging, and the calendar web UI."

Chandler is in an active phase of development. The software has evolved from an interesting concept to a functioning system in recent years. Organizations and individuals who have a need for some advanced management and communications capabilities should be able to find some benefits from using Chandler.

to post comments

The Chandler Project moves forward

Posted Feb 14, 2008 3:50 UTC (Thu) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (4 responses)

3D Realms Corporation, producers of Duke Nukem Forever, lauded this release of Chandler, saying that it was making a big difference in their effectiveness. :-)

Duke Nukem Forever finally getting released? (Off-topic)

Posted Feb 14, 2008 4:18 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link] (3 responses)

Does this mean that next release of Duke Nukem Forever will finally see the light of day??

Duke Nukem Forever finally getting released? (Off-topic)

Posted Feb 14, 2008 4:34 UTC (Thu) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

3D Realms just released another trailer for it in December. Look at http://www.3drealms.com/duke4/ Now, I think they're independently wealthy, or cracked, or both. Unlike the Chandler folks who were just independently wealthy and wanted to be more professional than they thought Open Source projects usually were, and paid for that by very professionally losing most of the advantages of Open Source never getting their project done. But 3D Realms claims they're still making Duke Nukem Forever, and someone will probably finish Chandler someday.

Duke Nukem Forever finally getting released? (Off-topic)

Posted Feb 14, 2008 12:50 UTC (Thu) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link] (1 responses)

Once the Perl6 engine is fully integrated.

Duke Nukem Forever finally getting released? (Off-topic)

Posted Feb 18, 2008 19:46 UTC (Mon) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]

I'm holding out for the Amiga OS5 port.

The Chandler Project moves forward

Posted Feb 14, 2008 4:23 UTC (Thu) by ikm (guest, #493) [Link] (1 responses)

Is this a dog's name, or a reference to Chandler Bing, or what? I don't get it... That's a
very strange name to me.

The Chandler Project moves forward

Posted Feb 18, 2008 22:26 UTC (Mon) by hingo (guest, #14792) [Link]

Chandler is a girl! Chandler is a girl!

The Chandler Project moves forward

Posted Feb 14, 2008 7:25 UTC (Thu) by andersg (subscriber, #25522) [Link]

For more background information I can recommend Scott Rosenberg's "Dreaming in code"

Groupware

Posted Feb 14, 2008 10:57 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link] (2 responses)

So how will this help me get laid?

thanks for the link...

Posted Feb 14, 2008 12:17 UTC (Thu) by nettings (subscriber, #429) [Link] (1 responses)

just in case somebody was about to ignore this - the previous post looks like a somewhat tired
joke, but the essay (by jamie zawinski of netscape fame) is really insightful, despite being 3
years old now. especially in hindsight, looking at all those "social networks" with millions
of users.

thanks for the link...

Posted Feb 14, 2008 14:15 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Said software, of course, really *does* help users get laid. That's sort of the point: if it's
nice enough to use that people use it to carry out ordinary social interaction (including
chatting each other up) then they'll find ways to use it for the stuff that 'groupware'
normally gets used for, *whether you want them to or not*.

A damn good essay.

The Chandler Project moves forward

Posted Feb 14, 2008 13:11 UTC (Thu) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link]

I hack on Bongo, but I follow pretty much all the free software "groupware" (ick) systems in terms of how they progress - there are a number of options out there now, to fit into virtually every circumstance - and I have to say, I've been really disappointed with Chandler as a project (I've tried the software a few times, and never really "got it", but that's probably just me).

A lot of funding went into OSAF, they had a lot of full-time developers, yet they're still not at the stage where something is releasable - and even still having discussions about re-architecture - and now they've hit a funding wall, have had to lose developers, and are trying to build user share. As a project, it should be much more successful that it is at the moment.

The Chandler Project moves forward

Posted Feb 15, 2008 21:07 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

> The 0.7.4 release adds a Tip of the day feature

Awesome!  If such meaningless features are at the top of the TODO list, Chandler must be
pretty much finished.

> Organizations and individuals who have a need for some advanced management and
communications capabilities should be able to find some benefits from using Chandler.

What on earth does this mean?  Does Chandler work or not?  One would suspect that Mr. Cook
hasn't even bothered to install it...?