[Wolfdev-Momentum] Intro to me and Momentum (re: Calendar Server)

[Talli Somekh]

Hello,

This is my first post, so I hope not to upset or to stir the pot too much.

My name is Talli Somekh and I am the head of a company in NYC called Musea 
Technologies. We focus on developing free software tools for nonprofit 
organizations. We use primarily the OpenACS toolkit 
(http://www.openacs.org) and PostgreSQL.

One of the items missing from our free software tool box (and everyone's 
obviously) is the calendar server that this list has been discussing. It so 
happens that earlier this week I was researching putting together a 
community to build such a project. Yesterday, I walked into the #calendar 
channel at irc.mozilla.org and began chatting with John Gray and Peter 
Bojanic.

In addition to these two guys (who are obviously extremely capable and 
great free software guys), I've been able to collect others who are 
interested in such a project. As a result, I've began to put together a 
mission statement for the project that I've code-named Momentum. (It's a 
play on the word Moment and a reference to the gathering of a free software 
project that NEEDS to happen)

I am planning on building a community site for this project very soon. I 
would really love to see this happen, and would like to see the community 
have a strong and active foundation.

I would like to build Momentum off of the libical project, meaning not just 
the software but the community that exists here. I am willing to step 
forward and take a leadership role in seeing this happen if people are up 
to joining.

Thanks, and I hope to see this work!

sincerely,

talli

----
The goal of Momentum is very focused: to develop a free (as in speech)
server that can store and serve icalendar, vcalendar and vcard data. As
John Gray mentioned (and admitted that the analogue might be too tight),
Momentum will be to calendaring and scheduling as Sendmail is to email.

Momentum will be designed to maximize deployment flexibility. Momentum will
be deployed either in the context of a client/server model or within a web
application or web service model.

Momentum will provide a standalone server for calendaring and scheduling
using the protocols defined in RFCs 2445, 2446 and 2447. It will provide an
application to store and manipulate iCal, IMIP and ITIP data that has been
stored in a SQL RDBMS.

Momentum will take advantage of the two years of development experience and
knowledge gathered in the libical project, a C library to process iCalendar
data. It is as of yet unclear what Momentum's implementation language will
be.

Momentum will provide a solution for those who seek to implement
collaborative applications without paying the various steep prices of
proprietary software. The Momentum Project will foster a community of
developers who are leading the software world in collaboration calendaring
and scheduling.

While many projects in the free software world that have addressed iCal,
vCal or vCard functionality have over-extended themselves by trying to
build both a server and a client. Momentum will not make this mistake
because we will focus entirely on providing developers with an application
that is agnostic to the client.

Momentum will be a server with a tight and focused API. Momentum's API will
provide developers of client applications the ability to interface with
Momentum either through direct interaction with the API or by using a
higher level scripting language to process iCal, vCal or vCard data served
by Momentum. In addition, Momentum will have APIs for new and popular
protocols such as XML-RPC, SOAP and WebDAV. ----
----


Musea Technologies      http://www.museatech.net
talli@museatech.net     70 Washington St
tel: 718 625 6798       Suite 402
fax: 718 925 3991       Brooklyn, NY
AOL IM: tallisomekh     MSN IM: talilee@hotmail.com