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This was a pretty quiet week for Hep development. I’ve been spending some time thinking about where to go next, but I’ve been so busy at my day job and in life that I haven’t had much time to work on code.

I did check some improvements to the web interface into CVS this afternoon. Screenshot:

I’ve also started working on improving the core Message class in messaging, but that’s not quite ready for checkin yet.

Chandler 0.1 has been released. It’s interesting to finally get a glimpse into what those guys at the OSAF have been up to. After spending a few minutes playing with Chandler, here are my notes:

1. I was surprised to see that there’s no support for reading or composing e-mail, which struck me as funny for a product that’s going to become a viable replacement for Outlook. But apparently they’ve been focused on the framework, not the functionality.
2. The focus of the current documentation is on creating “Viewer Parcels”, which are basically plug-ins that provide some functionality within the shell of the main application. This seems similar to the design of Nautilus, the Gnome file manager, which makes sense because Andy Hertzfeld, who now works for OSAF, was one of the original designers of Nautilus. The value of Nautilus views vs. external applications has been debated recently, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out with Chandler. Do people really want to have their e-mail, contacts, calendar, music library, time tracking, etc, all within the same application, or are many single-task applications better?
3. They’re planning on using Python’s built-in POP3/SMTP/IMAP libraries for networking. Why not use Twisted, which is much more powerful, and quickly becoming the standard for Python-based network applications? Maybe they wanted to avoid another dependency.
4. A question I’ve faced myself: What’s the best way to distribute and unstable Python application for testing? The OSAF solution: Bundle an entire Python distribution with your binaries. No extra packages to install, and you just delete the folder when you’re done testing. But it makes for a big download.

The CVS version of Hep supports reading and posting messages through NNTP. You can connect to Hep using any newsreader, such as Mozilla News or Outlook Express. Connect on Port 5119, open your newsreader’s subscribe window, and you’ll see something like this:

You can subscribe to your Hep connections just like you would any newsgroup. Then you’ll be able to read your messages:

You can also post messages to any connection that supports posting, such as local folders and blogs.

I’m going to be away for the weekend, so this will be the last stop on our tour of Hep CVS for this week. But I’ll continue to post updates here as more interesting features get added to CVS.

Finally! The EPIC project is working on real Perl support for Eclipse. They’ve already got a nice editor plugin with syntax highlighting, automatic flagging of errors, content assist for looking up module methods, and a regular expression tester. I’m using it now, and it’s nice!

If you’re using Hep CVS and are subscribed to Radio-generated RSS feeds you’ll probably get a bunch of messages that you’ve already seen before the next time you update from CVS. This is because of a change in the way Hep generates message IDs from RSS feeds that have the guid attribute set for entries.

I’m having a busy day today, so today’s stop on our tour of Hep CVS will be

a short one.

As with previous versions, the CVS version of Hep lets you download new

messages into your email client through POP3. There are a couple of

differences, though. First, the port has been changed from 5536 to 5110 (If

you’ve been paying attention you may notice a pattern here: Hep servers run

on [regular port]+5000). Second, the POP3 server now uses your “New

Messages” view to determine which messages will be available for you to

download. If you set up your email client to delete messages after

downloading, Hep will mark the messages as having been read, making them

disappear from your “New Messages” view.

Here’s a screen shot of Evolution displaying messages downloaded from Hep:

src='http://www.fettig.net/images/screenshots/hep/thumbnail-pop3-reading.png

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Here’s a good article on using Mozilla for debugging web pages. One of the hard things about building web pages is figuring out what’s actually going on - what the web browser is getting from the server, and how it’s interpreting it. Mozilla makes it possible to get at a lot of this information, and this article points to a few features I didn’t know were there. The HTTP Header viewer is particularly cool.

Before we continue with the tour of CVS Hep, a reminder: New features are being added, and bugs are being fixed, all the time. Frequent use of ‘cvs update’ for both the hep and messaging modules is recommended.

One of the most powerful new features in the CVS version of Hep is message archiving. It’s typical for RSS aggregators to only let you see the messages that are currently in the RSS feed. But this doesn’t help you if you’re looking to read an old message that’s dropped off the bottom of the list.

Hep solves this problem by archiving old messages for each connection, even when they’re no longer available from the source. These messages are marked internally as ‘deleted’, but they’re still visible through the web interface. You can identify these messages because they’ll show up with a grey background, like this:

Of course, keeping all these messages around wouldn’t do much good if you weren’t able to search them. So Hep keeps a searchable index of all messages (powered by Lupy). You can search your messages through the web interface:

Along with indexing the title and body of messages, Hep tracks metadata, such as whether messages have been read or deleted. This makes it possible to create “views”, virtual folders that display messages from all your connections that meet certain criteria. Currently the only view available in Hep is “New Messages”, but more will come in the future, along with the ability to make your own views.

The “New Messages” view is also used by Hep’s POP3 server, to let you download unread messages into your e-mail client. More on that tomorrow.

I’ve made a couple of changes in CVS that allow Hep to run on Mac OS X. If you’re a Mac user and you’ve had trouble running Hep, do a ‘cvs update’ in your hep/ and messaging/ directories, and you should be good to go.

If you’ve used Hep 0.3, you’re familiar with the idea of message sources

(places you get messages from) and destinations (places you send messages to).

In the CVS version of Hep, these are replaced with connections. A connection

is a way of accessing messages in a particular location. Depending on the

type of connection, you may be able to read messages, post new messages, or

both.

To add a connection to Hep, you’ll need to give Hep a URL that tells it

how to connect. Currently the Hep messaging library supports the following types of URLs:

• http://[username:password@]server.com/path/to/file.rss (RSS and regular HTML files are supported, read only).
• blogger://username:password@server/path/to/rpc/BLOGID (Blogger API, supports reading and posting). The Metaweblog API will be supported soon.
• pop3://username:password@server (pop3 e-mail, read only)
• mailto://user@server (post only)

Once you’ve set up connections, you can read, search and post messages through

Hep’s web interface:

That’s all for today. Over the rest of the week I’ll cover:

• Message archives, and fulltext searches
• Reading and posting messages through e-mail
• Reading and posting messages through NNTP