Hello and wel­come to my GSoC report for my eighth week of work about sup­port­ing mul­ti­ple back­ends in “Get­ting Things Gnome!”.

This week, I’ve fin­ished the first com­plete ver­sion of the couchdb back­end. This one is sup­port­ing all GTG’s fea­tures (sub­tasks, tags, fuzzy dates...), so it can be used as default back­end (instead of the xml one).

Its per­for­mances are fairly good: for small and medium sets of tasks (I’ve been test­ing it with ~500 tasks) it’s a tad slower than the xml one, but I sus­pect that for big tasks sets there are speed advan­tages. Any­way, being GTG 0.3 fully asyn­cro­nous, users shouldn’t even notice it.

I’ve writ­ten a unit-test for it, and started to check how it behaves with repli­cat­ing couchdb data­bases. It works quite well (a few crashes occur from time to time), but I’ll test it a bit more next week.

I haven’t been able to get auto­matic repli­ca­tion of the data­base via Ubuntu One so far. I’m start­ing to think that some­thing is wrong in my installation.

Next week, I’ll keep on test­ing the couchdb back­end and I’ll work on fin­ish­ing the RTM one (which should be the last big one, since the Evo­lu­tion one is very easy, thanks to the nice api).

Ciao!

Hello and wel­come to my GSoC report for my eighth week of work about sup­port­ing mul­ti­ple back­ends in “Get­ting Things Gnome!”.

This week, I’ve fin­ished the first com­plete ver­sion of the couchdb back­end. This one is sup­port­ing all GTG’s fea­tures (sub­tasks, tags, fuzzy dates...), so it can be used as default back­end (instead of the xml one).

Its per­for­mances are fairly good: for small and medium sets of tasks (I’ve been test­ing it with ~500 tasks) it’s a tad slower than the xml one, but I sus­pect that for big tasks sets there are speed advan­tages. Any­way, being GTG 0.3 fully asyn­cro­nous, users shouldn’t even notice it.

I’ve writ­ten a unit-test for it, and started to check how it behaves with repli­cat­ing couchdb data­bases. It works quite well (a few crashes occur from time to time), but I’ll test it a bit more next week.

I haven’t been able to get auto­matic repli­ca­tion of the data­base via Ubuntu One so far. I’m start­ing to think that some­thing is wrong in my installation.

Next week, I’ll keep on test­ing the couchdb back­end and I’ll work on fin­ish­ing the RTM one (which should be the last big one, since the Evo­lu­tion one is very easy, thanks to the nice api).

Ciao!

This week, I’ve started to work on  two back­ends planned for my GSoC on “Get­ting Things Gnome!”.
One is the Remem­ber The Milk back­end, for which I’ve writ­ten the authen­ti­ca­tion sys­tem and started to sync task titles (I already have the code for the rest in the old plu­gin, but it will need a bit of refac­tor­ing to make it eas­ier to read and com­pat­i­ble to the new back­end sys­tem).
The more inter­est­ing back­end is the one based on couchdb, which should enable to keep two GTG instal­la­tions in sync. This back­end should also work on the Ubuntu, which has a couchdb imple­men­ta­tion which dif­fers a lit­tle bit from the stan­dard (e.g. deleted records are not really deleted, but are “marked” as deleted — FYI, a good tuto­r­ial on Couchdb and Python is the one on Ars by Ryan Paul). Any­way, so far, it’s work­ing nicely, although it’s not yet sup­port­ing all the fea­tures of a  gtg Task.

This week, I’ve started to work on  two back­ends planned for my GSoC on “Get­ting Things Gnome!”.
One is the Remem­ber The Milk back­end, for which I’ve writ­ten the authen­ti­ca­tion sys­tem and started to sync task titles (I already have the code for the rest in the old plu­gin, but it will need a bit of refac­tor­ing to make it eas­ier to read and com­pat­i­ble to the new back­end sys­tem).
The more inter­est­ing back­end is the one based on couchdb, which should enable to keep two GTG instal­la­tions in sync. This back­end should also work on the Ubuntu, which has a couchdb imple­men­ta­tion which dif­fers a lit­tle bit from the stan­dard (e.g. deleted records are not really deleted, but are “marked” as deleted — FYI, a good tuto­r­ial on Couchdb and Python is the one on Ars by Ryan Paul). Any­way, so far, it’s work­ing nicely, although it’s not yet sup­port­ing all the fea­tures of a  gtg Task.

This week has been busy for me, since I have (just a few hours ago) dis­cussed my mas­ter the­sis. Any­way, now I’m going to be work­ing full time on GTG, which is nice.

So, this week I have fin­ished the first ver­sion of the Launch­pad back­end (import­ing in a read-only fash­ion launch­pad bugs assigned to some­body in GTG). I’m think­ing if it would be inter­est­ing to have the pos­si­bil­ity of chang­ing some­thing about the bug through its task in GTG, but I haven’t found nice ideas so far. I’ll  look into mak­ing a bugzilla back­end, since many peo­ple requested that.

Sec­ondly, I’ve writ­ten an export back­end to Zeit­geist, so that tasks that have been com­pleted are also vis­i­ble there. This makes it easy to see what it has been done day by day. Another approach would be inform­ing Zeit­geist when a task gets mod­i­fied, cre­ated and so on (like a reg­u­lar doc­u­ment). While this sec­ond approach is more “zeit­geisty” (since it leaves a trace of the activ­ity of the user), I think that for todo items the impor­tant infor­ma­tion to keep trace of is when they get done. I’ll see what users pre­fer when they start using it, or you can leave your opin­ion in the com­ments here.

I’ve also writ­ten a patch to gnome-activity-journal to sup­port TODO items (which are sup­ported in Zeit­geist 0.4 which has just been released, and GAJ is being updated to use that).
That’s what you should get in Sep­tem­ber (~ planned GTG release time):

Next week, I’ve a lot of things to do. A few of them are:

• I’ll add a “remem­ber the milk” back­end, which will have a series of advan­tages ver­sus my old plu­gin (auto­matic sync­ing is one of them)
• I’ll review and ask for merg­ing to trunk the code for my UI and the tomboy back­end, so that other devel­op­ers and brave users can start using my code
• I’ll make order among my threads, since a few libraries that I used have a series of syn­chro­nous calls which can make clos­ing GTG slower than nor­mal. I’ve dis­cussed this with a friend (the cre­ator of Lightspark), and a few inter­est­ing ideas have come out.

This week has been busy for me, since I have (just a few hours ago) dis­cussed my mas­ter the­sis. Any­way, now I’m going to be work­ing full time on GTG, which is nice.

So, this week I have fin­ished the first ver­sion of the Launch­pad back­end (import­ing in a read-only fash­ion launch­pad bugs assigned to some­body in GTG). I’m think­ing if it would be inter­est­ing to have the pos­si­bil­ity of chang­ing some­thing about the bug through its task in GTG, but I haven’t found nice ideas so far. I’ll  look into mak­ing a bugzilla back­end, since many peo­ple requested that.

Sec­ondly, I’ve writ­ten an export back­end to Zeit­geist, so that tasks that have been com­pleted are also vis­i­ble there. This makes it easy to see what it has been done day by day. Another approach would be inform­ing Zeit­geist when a task gets mod­i­fied, cre­ated and so on (like a reg­u­lar doc­u­ment). While this sec­ond approach is more “zeit­geisty” (since it leaves a trace of the activ­ity of the user), I think that for todo items the impor­tant infor­ma­tion to keep trace of is when they get done. I’ll see what users pre­fer when they start using it, or you can leave your opin­ion in the com­ments here.

I’ve also writ­ten a patch to gnome-activity-journal to sup­port TODO items (which are sup­ported in Zeit­geist 0.4 which has just been released, and GAJ is being updated to use that).
That’s what you should get in Sep­tem­ber (~ planned GTG release time):

Next week, I’ve a lot of things to do. A few of them are:

• I’ll add a “remem­ber the milk” back­end, which will have a series of advan­tages ver­sus my old plu­gin (auto­matic sync­ing is one of them)
• I’ll review and ask for merg­ing to trunk the code for my UI and the tomboy back­end, so that other devel­op­ers and brave users can start using my code
• I’ll make order among my threads, since a few libraries that I used have a series of syn­chro­nous calls which can make clos­ing GTG slower than nor­mal. I’ve dis­cussed this with a friend (the cre­ator of Lightspark), and a few inter­est­ing ideas have come out.