End of obm summit

The obm summit , which was more an obm coding party, has ended. It was a good experience, for all of us (Pierre Baudracco, Thomas Cataldo, Sylvain Garcia, Nicolas Lascombes, Anthony Prades and myself (Mehdi Rande)). It's time for a little feedback, but first let's start with the basics.
When I take a look at the posts in this blog, I see that I didn't even introduce the aim of this blog. It's not to late.
My name is Mehdi Rande, I'm french, and I'm part of the development team of OBM, a groupware/crm free software. I'm in charge of the web interface of the software (there must be a link somwhere on the right of the screen to have more informations about OBM).
Last week, the more involved members of the OBM development team (what we call OBM core team) went to Agde, to have a one full week coding party.
The result was quite good, of course a lot of commit was made, but most important we were able to freely discuss about OBM next features, implementation, and development.
Oh I know you might think "Well you can discuss about that every day...", that's not true, in every working day life, a big part of my time is used for team management, project support, co-worker assistance... The other part is used for OBM coding, so it's quite hard to find time to discuss with the whole core team.

Of course everything is not perfect, in the last days of the week everyone was very tired, we had some violents flames about coding, and so.
But the conclusion is good, and I hope I will enjoy once again a obm summit.

Free software and injustice

We are working hard for the next release of OBM. Waking up early in the morning, going to bed late in night.
Everything is going smooth, except one thing... while us (the obm core team developers) are working under horribles conditions, our leader, Pierre Baudracco is enjoying free sex, alchool and is waking late in the afternoon. Here is a litlle picture of him, juste after his wild sexual harrasement on Sylvain Garcia...

Life is hard, free software developer life is harder... OBM core team member life is hell.

Javascript and timezone

One of the major technical improvement of OBM-2.2 is the management of the user timezone. Timezone... there is a lot of technical issue behind this simple word, for example with mysql, wich doesn't support timezone on datetime field (timestamp datatype support it thought, but doesn't handle 64 bits timestamp).
One of the main issue is... Javascript!

The javascript Date object doesn't handle timezone... well that's not true, a Date object is initialize with the browser timezone. It's not possible to change the Date timezone but it is possible to handle utc date. The Date object give you also a getOffset function... so all is good... or not.
First thing, a simple usage case :

My calendar only work with my local timezone... let's take a quite complicate one : Europe/Paris.

var timestamp = -1861920561000 // 1911-01-01 00:00:00 in france
var date = new Date(timestamp);
alert(date); /Sun Jan 01 1911 00:50:39 GMT+0100 (CET)

Well in fact in 1911 Europe/Paris timezone was +00:09:21, but javascript seems to only handle the DST of +/- 1hour twice by year. So event the local timezone is buggy.

So for a javascript calendar handeling a remote timezone, it's quite impossible to use the Date object.

The only way we found is to make our javascript parser for the Olson database binary files and then make an custom object Date. A javascript is not the best language to make a binary parser, so we've done the parser in Java, and then compiled javascript with the GWT toolkit.

The source of the custom Date object and the Olson binary parser will come with the source of the 2.2, so if you have trouble with timezone take a look into the ressources/js/date.js and /ressource/js/bin of OBM.

Obm submit fist part

It's fifteen to midnight, after some light troll about http://www.obm.org, a idea rose to give a little more life to the obm web site. A blog!!! Well I'm not quite a fan of blogs, but why not.
So here i am for the second obm submit (the first one was at Mont-de-Marsan during the RMLL) with Anthony, Nicolas, Thomas, Pierre and Sylvain, coding late in night, and waking up before the sunrise.
The main subject here is to take big step in the 2.2 developement, and a second subject is the 2.1.11 release.
The 2.1.11 might be released in the night, the 2.2 is advancing well.
The main problem is .... no more beer in the pub....