Keith Devens .com

Chandler 0.1

Mitch Kapor: Chandler at O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference

Andy Hertzfeld and I will be making a presentation on Chandler on Thursday, April 24, at 3:45 P.M., at the upcoming O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in Santa Clara. This will be the first public demo of what the OSAF team has been working on. I expect that the conference will be heavy weblogged, so you should be able to get a sense of the goings on wherever you are.

What we'll be showing is the 0.1 release of Chandler. Our internal 0.03 release of this past week has virtually the entire (limited) feature set of 0.1 with the exception of a couple of cool features we are trying to get ready for the demo.

Since we are all mortified at the prospect of embarrassing ourselves in public, we are trying to make sure that what is out there is real code we can be proud of.

I've been referring to Chandler 0.1 as our "ultrasound" release: the fetus won't be viable outside the womb, but if you look closely you can see tiny arms and legs waving around and you can believe it's going to turn into a real baby eventually. With 0.1, we will also open up our bugzilla database and accept bug reports and submissions of patches per guidelines which will come with the release.

Very cool. The page for Chandler 0.1 is an interesting read:

In the spirit of getting the community on board as soon as possible, we want to make source code available as soon as we have something we don't intend to throw away, but that will likely be a foundation for the real application. This means issuing a release that will lack most key features, have a very limited and primitive user interface, and won't be usable for real work.

A good 80 percent of our effort to date has been evaluating the open source projects we're building Chandler on, and learning how to use them (i.e., getting them to build!). These projects include Python, ZODB, wxWindows, wxPython, and in the future, Mozilla. This has taken a lot longer than expected because many of these projects are either incomplete or in a state of change. So a major goal of our first public release is to include precompiled versions of Chandler and its underlying technologies on all three major platforms, as well as source code you can easily build yourself using the latest compilers for each platform.

Chandler stores data in an RDF-compatible format using ZODB4, which is a persistent object database. The advantage of persistence is that data is accessed in native Python data structures. This eliminates the need to write code that translates data back and forth between native data structures and a foreign format, and it also eliminates code for housekeeping tasks like garbage collection, saving and storing to disk, and so on. To store data in Chandler, we specify the format of each data type in an RDF schema that's stored in a persistent Python data structure (see the diagram). Instances of the RDF data type can be created and used directly from the schema.

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