Well, after our last presentation too many things have happened. Let’s try to summarise them briefly.
We started to spread the word about our work in the free/libre/open software community (starting with a face to face meeting with Richard Stallman, who showed us interest in turning Kune a GNU project). We were trying to create a group of followers/participants/supporters around Kune…
However, a few weeks later Google Wave arrived. Suddenly, there was a huge & fantastic project that was overlapping in several parts with Kune, and that was going to be released as free/libre software. Besides, we had multiple things in common:
- Wave goes in the same direction of our goals, such as:
- federation/decentralisation & interoperatibility of similar sites
- concurrent edition of documents
- easy control versioning
- user extensibility
- Wave uses exactly the same technologies we chose to use in 2007 (GWT, Guice, XMPP), improving them with the “Wave protocol” in order to accomplish the previous goals.
Thus, we couldn’t but decide to use/integrate such a gift into our code. However, there was a drawback: that was summer 2009, and since then we had to follow their release calendar. In the meanwhile, we started to play and familiarise with their technology, doing small pieces of software [1][2][3] that we expect to integrate in Kune later on.
In November 2010, they relased Wave in a Box with the bless of Apache Foundation. Thus, we started to integrate WIAB in our code with the participation and support of IEPALA.
By now, we are working in a renewed user interface that mainly:
- integrates Wave
- substitutes some libraries and code (because GWT got more mature)
For visualising what we are talking about, here you can see a draft of what we are working on:
Remember, you can participate in Kune in many different ways.
Feedback & impressions, as usual, are more than welcome!
