all about lars kneschke

We did it! I just uploaded the first stable release of Tine 2.0 Mialena to our servers. About 2 months behind schedule, but we did it!

I really like the new user interface and it is very cool that I can read emails on my Motorola Milestone now. Just try it out yourself and download Tine 2.0.

Thanks to my team members here at Metaways and to all community contributors for their hard work! Tine 2.0 really rocks!

And thanks to my mom, my dad, to Sonja, Mialena, Lara and Ferike.

The next module we like to implement is a filemanager application. Such a filemanager application should also have Webdav interface. As you can mount Webdav shares with any operating system you can edit files directly, without needing to download them first and uploading them again after you finished the modifications.

Caldav is a protocol based on Webdav and enables you to share calendars with desktop clients like ICal, Sunbird, Lightning and Evolution. Also the IPhone supports Caldav.

One user posted a link in our forum to SabreDAV. SabreDAV is a very well written Webdav implementation which also supports Caldav. In the last few days I took my spare time and integrated SabreDAV with Tine 2.0. So far I'm able to access the contacts from the Tine 2.0 addressbook as vcards(webdav, using Windows Explorer and KDE's Dolphin) and integrated the SabreDAV calendar backend(Caldav with Thunderbird). This means that the part how to talk with the clients is solved.

Now we just need to implement the right backend classes and then we will have Webdav and Caldav access to our Tine 2.0 data. And we will also be able to access files stored in the (to be written) filemanager using Webdav.

Open Soure rules!

So far the code only exists on my local installation. As soon as the code can also run on different systems I'll commit the code to our svn.

I just uploaded the new packages for Tine 2.0 Mialena milestone 2. You you can get them from your download page.

Be aware that this release is an unstable release. There are still some bugs open and if you use Tine 2.0 in a production environment please wait until we have released the stable packages for Tine 2.0 Mialena.

Improved userinterface

Cornelius spent much time, to implement the new look of Tine 2.0.

He spent most of his time to implement the tabbed user interface. Until this release all applications got started and switched with the buttons in the bottom left corner. Now starting an application and switching between applications got separated. If you only use 4 applications it will be much easier to switch between them,
as you will only see the 4 tabs for these applications. In the past it got confusing if you had to many applications activated and tried to switch between them.




Another new feature implemented by Cornelius is the reworked filter toolbar. The filter toolbar can be permanently collapsed now and also stores the selected folders. In the past there was a little bit magic involved, to which folders the filter got applied.




ActiveSync improvements

Based on the new filter logic, you can define now a filter to used for synchronisation with your mobile phone. Just save your filter settings and then you can apply the newly saved filter to to your mobile phone. Hint: Just try it only in the addressbook! The calendar still needs some love.
Sending emails from your mobil phone works now too. Synchronizing the emails is something I'm still working on.




Felamimail speed up

And Philipp also worked on an important part of Tine 2.0. The email client is now much more responsive. The folder cache gets updated in background, which gives you immediate access to your newest messages. Depending on the speed of your imapserver the older messages will be available after a short period.

That's all for today. Enjoy the new release and give us feedback in our forums.

On next Monday(22 March) we will release the second beta of Tine 2.0 Mialena.

The I will be alone for 2 weeks, as Cornelius is on vacation for 2 weeks and Philipp will be away for 3 months to be a good dad.

If everything goes well we will release the first release candidate until 9 April. The final release should be available one week later.

For a very long time I tried to integrate a mapping solution into Tine 2.0. Just try to remember that 2.0 in our projects name stands for Web 2.0. So it must be able to use a webservice to display a map.

First we integrated Google Maps. Shortly after we had finished the implementation, we had to remove it again, because Google prohibits the usage of their maps in non public systems. And buying a Google Maps license is very expensive. I should have read the usage policy before I started implementing it.

So we had a closer look at really free mapping solutions. There are at least two solutions available: Mapstraction and OpenLayers. As OpenLayers is also the foundation for the map provided by OpenStreetMap we decided to bet on this library. I started implementing ExtJS classes for easy integration of maps into Tine 2.0 until I discovered GeoExt. GeoExt is developed from people who seem to know more about mapping solutions than me. So I dropped my code again and implemented the map widget for Tine 2.0 based on GeoExt which is based on OpenLayers.

But displaying a map is only one part of the story. The other part is to know which part of the map to display. Even if you can get my postal address, you still need to know the coordinates. And again OpenStreetMap comes to our rescue.
They just launched Nominatim. Nominatim is a webservice which allows you to resolve an address into its coordinates. Just try this link to find out where we work.

To make the long story short, you can display maps from OpenStreetMap for your contacts now.

And this is how it looks like:

As you can see I live near a Autobahn.

Another cool feature to implement in the future, is that we are able to validate or complete addresses this way. As Pickhuben(the street where our office is located) is already unique, Nomination can return us the whole address including village, county, postalcode and of course the coordinates. Or can filter your contacts and display them on a map. Really cool features just waiting to get implemented.

The 2.0 in the name of Tine 2.0 stands for "Web 2.0". From the beginning it was clear, that we need to be open to other systems. There must be a clear separation between the business logic and the userinterface.

We solved this problem automatically by having a JavaScript userinterface which talks to a PHP based webservice via JSON. This way we have a JSON based webservice other webclients can connect to for free. We support JSON-RPC and JSON-SMD, which allows you to connect to Tine 2.0 with any language which supports HTTP and JSON.

As a heavy user of the Zend Framework, it was very sad that the Zend Framework provides Zend_Json_Server which made implementing the server side for Tine 2.0 very easy, but no Zend_Json_Client.

Up till now....

Introducing Zend_Json_Client ...

I filled the gap, by implementing Zend_Json_Client.
The Zend_Json_Client allows you to connect from other PHP based webapplications to any JSON-RPC server. So far I have the tested the implementation only against the Zend_Json_Server. As the Zend_Json_Client also supports JSON-SMD we are able to verify the request method name and number of parameters already on client side.

I modelled the Zend_Json_Client after the Zend_XmlRpc_Client and used as many parts as possible from the Zend_Json_Server classes. As a next step I need to get in contact with the maintainer of the Zend_Json classes to get the Zend_Json_Client pushed into Zend Frameworks SVN. Then it will be available to any user of Zend Framework in the future.

... and Zend_Service_Tine20

As we have a Zend_Json_Client now, we also need Zend_Service_Tine20 now. Zend_Service_Tine20 is a very thin layer on top of Zend_Json_Client which provides functions to login and logout from Tine 2.0. More is not needed as all other functionality is provided by plain JSON-RPC calls.

But how does code look like?

Connecting to Tine 2.0 is very easy now. To test the functionality lets try to do following. Insert a new contact into the addressbook and add a lead associated with this contact into the CRM. A typical situation when you have a contact formular on your public website.


// url of your Tine 2.0 installation
$tine20Url = 'http://tine20/index.php';
// login name
$tine20Loginname = 'loginname';
// password
$tine20Password = 'password';
// id of addressbook container
$addressbookContainerId = '9';
// id of CRM container
$crmContainerId = '14';


// set include path to find all needed classes
set_include_path('/var/www/tine20' . PATH_SEPARATOR . '/var/www/tine20/library' . PATH_SEPARATOR . get_include_path());

require_once 'Zend/Loader/Autoloader.php';
$autoloader = Zend_Loader_Autoloader::getInstance();
$autoloader->setFallbackAutoloader(true);

// initialize Tine 2.0 service
$tine20 = new Zend_Service_Tine20($tine20Url);

// login into Tine 2.0
$response = $tine20->login($tine20Loginname, $tine20Password);
var_dump($response);

// call Tinebase.getAllRegistryData directly
$result = $tine20->call('Tinebase.getAllRegistryData');

// call Tinebase.getAllRegistryData using a Tinebase proxy class
$tinebase = $tine20->getProxy('Tinebase');
$result = $tinebase->getAllRegistryData();

// get a proxy class for the Addressbook namespace
$addressbook = $tine20->getProxy('Addressbook');
// create a new contact
$contact = $addressbook->saveContact(array(
'n_family' => 'Picard',
'n_given' => 'Jean-Luc',
'container_id' => $addressbookContainerId
));

// get a proxy class for the CRM namespace
$crm = $tine20->getProxy('Crm');
// create a new lead in the CRM and assign contact created above as costumer
$crm->saveLead(array(
'lead_name' => 'Test lead',
'leadstate_id' => 1,
'leadtype_id' => 1,
'leadsource_id' => 3,
'start' => '2009-11-13 21:00:00',
'description' => 'Added via Tine 2.0 Service',
'container_id' => $crmContainerId,
'relations' => array(array(
'type' => 'CUSTOMER',
'related_record' => $contact
))
));

// logout from Tine 2.0
$tine20->logout();

If you execute this piece of code you should have new contact in your addressbook and a new lead in your CRM.

If you have any questions feel free to ask in our PHP Backend forum.

Ich war mit Sonja und ein paar Bekannten hier aus Mielkendorf auf Kiels längster Nacht

Natürlich mussten die Kieler Nachrichten sofort darüber berichten. (Ja das bin wirklich ich in der Mitte des Fotos!)