Raw

Just had a quick look at the latest Chandler offerings, bit of a mixed bag.

Chandler consists of a Chandler Desktop, Chandler Server and Chandler Hub Sharing Service. Chandler Preview manages Notes, Messages, Tasks and Events. Chandler is not a full-fledge email application. However you can send and receive items from other Chandlers users as well as set up special Chandler IMAP folders to drag emails from your favorite email application into Chandler.

Longer term, we hope to enrich our PIM workflows with contacts and relationship management and take on the challenge of integrating documents, resources and large catalogs of data into the core information management workflows we have today.

On the positive side: the UI's looking good, the GTD-style todo manager looks like something I could use, and there's some support for AtomPub as well as what seems reasonable URI mapping/service description. My impression is a lot of what they expose over HTTP may well be usable. They have tests and continuous integration in place, which is a good indicator that a practical product is on its way.

On the negative side, taken as a whole the system looks insanely complex, particularly in terms of data modelling. There's the Python object model, a relational DB mapping (which, if I found the right bit, seems to be a kind of graph store), some BerkleyDB stuff, a raft of XML schemas. All of this seems to exploded from their original simple notion of items with attributes (which led to the avoiding RDF on grounds of its perceived complexity - not a little ironic). Not sure what to make of the Yes Invented Here Morse Code sync protocol, or the CMP one for server management (they may be positive points, I dunno). Does seem like they have design by committee in place. The Wiki-oriented docs are near-impossible to navigate, easy to find yourself reading 5-year old cruft. My impression is what they have internally is (still) bedlam. This is before they start looking at contacts/relationships and other kinds of data.

So basically I was frightened off looking much closer at the core apps, I wish the developers luck. Attaching to the things through regular HTTP/WebDAV/AtomPub does sound viable, and bridging programmatically through plugins may be worth investigating.

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