[Kolab-devel] SPL for Kolab Webinterface

[Bernhard Reiter]

Hi,

On Tuesday 17 October 2006 01:28, Markus Heller wrote:
> > > Estimations are always tricky, but we expect to be able to create a
> > > useable webinterface until end of the year with a budget of 4000 EUR.
> > > Please note that it will only have primitive mail support (at least at
> > > the beginning, it can always be improved later).
> >
> > I still find this strange, as people on this have stated, in the last
> > months only, that with some weeks effort horde will work might work well
> > with kolab. Why not go that route and fix the kolab-horde interface. 

out of two reasons:

a) to make this production ready, some expect significantly more work.
KK's development estimations have been (a while back) that it will be
easier to write a new webinterface from scratch then to fix Horde properly.
b) funding.

> > Once that is done, all the nice horde goodies (e.g. a webinterface for
> > pda's) are automatically available to kolab, being much more than mail
> > support alone.  At the same maintainance of this code is automatically
> > obtained from the horde community.

I think this is clear to everybody involved 
that it is good to share effort with a community.

> Richard is right: It would be hell of an effort to develop an interface
> from ground up, and it would disintegrate the community and bind valuable
> developer resources. Better fix the Horde interface and profit from
> security fixes from that neighbouring community.

It is not a good idea, if it is more work to do this 
than to create a different interface,
probably also sharing work on the components, e.g. selecting good libraries.

> The tendency to build every little application again and again from ground
> up is a great hindrance to the entire Open Source community and it will
> eventually lead to a huge landscape of incompatible and half-baked
> solutions.

There is a tendency to reinvent the wheel, but not in this particular case.
In general sometimes it is even better for the Free Software community
to do a new design than to do carry on with solutions that have a non-suitable
design and will take more effort to maintain reasonably.
The last word on Horde is not out yet,
so if we get Horde to a point where it will be easier to fix
and maintain, it would be cool of course.
So there are a few people that actually do little improvements 
to Horde and we will see how far this gets.

But given that (older) estimation we should also look into 
alternatives. 

> 4000 Euros? Well, better multiply by 100, to be realistic. Then you'll have
> a solid funding... The alternative would be to engage developers from
> countries like India. Then 4k Euros will yield about 10 developer months. 

A good webinterface will need the experience and communication with
people that have the enterprise experience with Kolab. And currently
many of those people sit in Europe. To my knowledge about prices
of qualified developers from India, we will not get that far with 4K
and it would also not help for the described reasons.

I have chatted with Raphael and he has adjusted the estimation
already. He took into account more feedback about the difficulties.
I do not think that hitting new initatives with general arguments
is a good idea. New programming languages and approaches have the chance
of significant different levels of efficiency and need to be considered
seriously.

Best,
Bernhard


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