Full Offline Mode now in Calendar 1.0 rc2

Calendar 1.0 rc 2 now comes with offline support packaged for CALDAV and ICS calendar providers. For CALDAV calendar it allows retrying of events if for any reason, the updates failed to be sent to the server.


You can find it at its new location on the addons.mozilla.org beta channel (If you still get 1.0rc1, then please try again in a few hours when the page cache has been updated).


If you encounter any issues, please file a bug at bugzilla.mozilla.org.


Or you can share your experiences via comments below.


Happy to hear from you regarding your experiences. Hope you enjoy the feature.


Cheers

mohit

Pencils Down GSoC

With in a few hours the awesome  programme that kept me occupied in the summers will be going off. But its the spirit that shall be living will continue on and great things will happen along the way, I am sure of it.

So here's the status of the bugs I have been working on.

1. bug 380060 - Implementation of offline mode - Done !! some minor tweaking here and there is left. Code-review is in progress and would be completed soon.
2. bug 502936 - prevention of calendar refresh mode - Done !! review+ on bugzilla
3. bug 586276 - Addition of Hooks in lightning - This project was last year's GSoC for Lightning, the code was reviewed by Philipp and he would after some consultation with Wolfgang and Ludovic would move it to the trunk. So I can mark this as done as well.

So essentially all the bugs assigned have been dealt as solved. I am very happy to have contributed to such a large project taken care of by peeps and geeks in countries all around the world.

Truly amazing.

Reflections on the programme coming soon.

Cheers

MSK

Stepping into the end of August

I am coming close to the end of Google Summer of Code and its been really an enriching experience for me, both as a developer and as a student. The code is already in review stages and it will take some time before it is in the trunk and finally in the product.

These days I am busy improving the code and getting feedback from a lot of people, especially Philipp. He's been busy with exams and still contributes fulltime to mozilla. Amazing. Seriously.

Anyways I have looking up bugzilla to find some bugs in the mozilla calendar arena which i can contribute to, but i cant seem to find many which I can help with. All of them require a deep deep understanding of the entire system which I unfortunately do not have. But yeah, maybe sometime in the near future I can start contributing as a much better open source developer.

So some more bug hunting going on these days. :)

Cheers
Mohit

Fixing bugs and biting burgers

Hi all,

I am back in Singapore and its amazing how fast and efficiently Phillip Kewisch has been working all this while. I don't think he even thinks of holidaying in Germany. While I was travelling and settling into my new hostel in Singapore, he efficiently reviewed my offline-syncing code for GSoC 2011 and provided me with a number of feedbacks.

Among them the most important is to allow the user to distinguish whether the remote calendar is working at all. This is because under the current system, if the remote calendar is not working then the calendar entry will be pushed into the cache and will appear in the views by default. This is something I will have to discuss with Wolfgang and Ludovic. Apart from that a few styling issues and the patch should be ready to be applied onto the trunk.

The discussion is available here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=380060. Share testing issues and your experience with the patch.

And I just finished porting the refresh killer bug 502936 to the Lightning 1.0 trunk. It should be available in the 1.0 release. Its high time Lightning stopped having beta releases all the time.

And now I working to finish off last year's GSoC project to allow for stubs in Lightning for extensions.

Long nights ahead.

Cherios
MSK

Patch ported and posted!

I just posted my first patch. Phew, it has been days of reconciliations between the inverse trunk and the lightning trunk, with a number of small differences to be resolved.

But, in the end, its been a positive weekend and week so far, I managed to clone the repository once from comm-central. Spent 4 hours in trying to get all the changesets, Mozilla source has really a long long history. Started a build environment once again and got the binaries i wanted.

So the patch has been tested on TB version> 5.0 and it works nicely in the offline mode as well as the 50x server unavailability mode.

Feel free to check out the patch. Its available here https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=380060

Comments will be greatly appreciated. I am looking forward to some feedback to improve the user experience in dealing with these scenarios.

Cheers
Mohit

Porting the patch to trunk

ah, first post in a long time.

So I am in India, enjoying an awesome summer with my friends and family. Eating a lot and having loads of fun time. However, I am happy to tell you that the offline patch is now complete and just needs to be ported over to the Head branch of Lightning, once that is done, future versions of lightning will then have the ability to do all the funny offline stuff they ever wanted.

Isn't it cool?

And apart from that GSoC has reached its mid-point an evaluations are beginning to happen. More coming later.

Cheers
Mohit

New Feature Implemented: Handling of Server Errors

Hola!

When we implemented the offline sync mechanism it occurred to us that the offline mechanism could be extended to a large number of situations and one of them is the situation where one can handle the server availability errors to a large extent.

Caldav Calendar code has been modified to allow for addition, modification and deletion of events during the case where a server is unavailable and a status message of 50x is received on the remote calendar request by lightning.

We assume that a human can't do anything about a server error, and we also assume that the server will be fixed. So this does not mean that the events u manipulate will sync remotely. They will however, sync, whenever the server comes back online.

you can find the binaries here and again these are purely for testing purposes and any bugs you can share with me via comments or mail me at: mohit.kanwal(AT)gmail.com

cheers
msk