Re: GNU GLUE?

[Dan Kuykendall]

> > Is Gnu Glue an abandoned project?
> 
> Not really. Since December, I've looked at the "FOX" cross-platform
> GUI library, the "Ruby" programming language, and at the beginning
> of January, I finally succeeded in convincing (or persuading? :-)
> the author or "cURL" to rerelease his (originally MPL'ed) client-side
> URL-handling library under an X11-style license such that it could be
> used in the GNU GLUE project. I will probably have around 2h/day of
> time to spend on GLUE for the next couple of weeks, and I intend
> to produce something "runnable" during that time.

I thought it was, which is why I started phpGroupWare
(http://www.phpgroupware.org). Its written in PHP and is fully webbased.
All client side code is pure HTML (no Java).

> > A front-to-back groupware suite is a huge job for a couple unpaid
> > developers - demoralizingly so.  But maybe if those developers around a
> > common project that is smaller in scope - but even more far-reaching in
> > its potential - they would would have the sense that such a job is
> > doable.  The hope that your work will *enable* a number of open/free
> > clients and add-on applications to fourish could be sustaining.

phpGroupWqare is doing a pretty darn good job with this.

> I believe that in order to succeed, an open-source groupware system must
> be conceptually as simple as possible, well-documented, easily customized,
> and must offer some new features that can't be found elsewhere.

This is our goal. If you want details, I can provide them. Everything
but the "well documented" part is moving along quickly.

> > I checked out the various groupware projects on SourceForge, and it
> > seems that almost all failed to get off the ground.  One admin, maybe a
> > developer, and virtually no activity.

We are very active, and have been #1 active project on SourceForge for 2
months now, even beeting out the sourceforge project itself.

> > Is it because the scope of such a task is so large?  It seems a huge job
> > for one or two unpaid developers.

It would be for only a few developers, but we have a team of active
developers. 4-5 working very regular, and another 20 or so that do so on
a fairly regular basis.

> I've learned that overall, sadly, there appears to be relatively little
> interest in groupware. It could be that I'm just not good at marketing,
> but the fact that Doug Engelbart's original 1960's idea of groupware
> using "networked personal computers" is still only partly implemented,
> and that Tim Berners-Lee's idea of a "read-write web" got lost during
> the web revolution,

I have to disagree. I have gotten several companies calling me with
interest in using phpGroupWare. Many companies already have, and some
are contracting me to write add-on applications that are specific to
their business needs.

I would like to have further discussions with the GNU GLUE team to see
if they would like to review our code and maybe join forces. Part of my
next steps with phpGW is to fully implement our ACL based security
throught the program, to write more add-on apps, improve the ones we
got, and to write an XML-RPC/SOAP wrapper to give other programming
languages access to our API.

Seek3r

Seek3r