[DotGNU]Status of things

[Dan Kuykendall (Seek3r)]

I kind of lost touch with whats going on in DotGNU and am hopeing 
someone can catch me up a bit.

As far as I can tell the only thing DotGNU is working on is Portable.NET 
(pnet). From the glancing looks I have taken over the last couple months 
I havent seen anything on the web services side (SOAP, XML-RPC, 
HailStorm) of stuff going on.

I have started some new code to seperate phpGW into two pieces, of a 
client and a server. The server can be talked to over SOAP or XML-RPC 
and provides its services to the client.
Right now I am working on the following parts:

1) Accounts. data is stored in DSML format. DSML is the XML version of 
LDAP, and there is some tools that will ast as a middle man to take the 
DSML request and get the data from an LDAP server. Right now I am 
storing the DSML docs into a database table.
You can find the DSML drafts at http://xml.coverpages.org/dsml.html
And a nice primer is at 
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-11-2000/jw-1110-dsml.html

2) Preferences. data is being stored in the XML-ized ACAP doc format.
http://xml.coverpages.org/acap.html
This will be an important one for everyone agree on for some of the 
common fields, and from there its all extensible for app/service 
specific needs.

3) Messaging. I have been fiddling with some SOAP/XML-RPC wrapper to 
IMAP, POP3 and NNTP calls. There is already an implementation of xml-rpc 
interface to POP3 and the concept is the same. Mine would just abstract 
the actual host. The primary goal is to keep a groupware client from 
having to deal with some seperate protocol if its already talking to the 
web service server for everything else anyways.

After I get these intial core services working, then I want to take on 
calendaring, todo, notes and addressbook services. Since phpGW was 
already n-tiered is isnt going to be that hard to take its storage and 
business objects and seperate them from the UI objects.

Basicly in the end I figure phpGroupWare would be a client that 
generates a web interface. It will use this new collection of service 
objects for much of its needs. It would be a close relationship to be 
sure, but since phpGW will be having to use xml-rpc/soap to use the 
services, it will have the effect of helping us document how it works, 
as well as give a good working example of how to use the server services.

Right now I am calling this new server the GroupWare Freedom Server 
(GWFS) just so that I have something to call it while talking about it.

Dan Kuykendall