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Radicale 1.0 is out!
1.0 - Sunflower
- Enhanced performances (by Mathieu Dupuy)
- Add MD5-APR1 and BCRYPT for htpasswd-based authentication (by Jan-Philip Gehrcke)
- Use PAM service (by Stephen Paul Weber)
- Don't discard PROPPATCH on empty collections (Markus Unterwaditzer)
- Write the path of the collection in the git message (Matthew Monaco)
- Tests launched on Travis
As explained in a previous mail, this version is called 1.0 because:
- there are no big changes since 0.10 but some small changes are really useful,
- simple tests are now automatically launched on Travis, and more can be added in the future (https://travis-ci.org/Kozea/Radicale).
This version will be maintained with only simple bug fixes on a separate git
branch called 1.0.x.
Now that this milestone is reached, it's time to think about the future. When Radicale has been created, it was just a proof-of-concept. The main goal was to write a small, stupid and simple CalDAV server working with Lightning, using no external libraries. That's how we created a piece of code that's (quite) easy to understand, to use and to hack.
The first lines have been added to the SVN (!) repository as I was drinking beers at the very end of 2008. It's now packaged for a growing number of Linux distributions.
And that was fun going from here to there thanks to you. So… Thank you, you're amazing. I'm so glad I've spent endless hours fixing stupid bugs, arguing about databases and meeting invitations, reading incredibly interesting RFCs and debugging with the fabulous clients from Apple. I mean: that really, really was really, really cool :).
During these years, a lot of things have changed and many users now rely on Radicale in production. For example, I use it to manage medical calendars, with thousands requests per day. Many people are happy to install Radicale on their small home servers, but are also frustrated by performance and unsupported specifications when they're trying to use it seriously.
So, now is THE FUTURE! I think that Radicale 2.0 should:
- rely on a few external libraries for simple critical points (dealing with HTTP and iCal for example),
- be thread-safe,
- be small,
- be documented in a different way (for example by splitting the client part from the server part, and by adding use cases),
- let most of the "auth" modules outside in external modules,
- have more and more tests,
- have reliable and faster filesystem and database storage mechanisms,
- get a new design :).
I'd also secretly love to drop the Python 2.x support.
These ideas are not all mine (except from the really, really, really important "design" point :p), they have been proposed by many developers and users. I've just tried to gather them and keep points that seem important to me.
Other points have been discussed with many users and contibutors, including:
- support of other clients, including Windows and BlackBerry phones,
- server-side meeting invitations,
- different storage system as default (or even unique?).
I'm not a huge fan of these features, either because I can't do anything about them, or because I think that they're Really Bad Ideas®™. But I'm ready to talk about them, because, well, I may not be always right!
Need to talk about this? You know how to contact us!