Novell announce Hula
It looks like all the Ximian Monkeys (well, technically, they’re Novell Monkeys now) are blogging about this: Hula, which is basically an open-source Exchange killer, drawing heavily on Gmail. Nat Friedman seems to have the most detail, including screenshots (which are very pretty thanks to Garrett LeSage’s great graphic and UI design).
As Nat goes on to say:
We will build a JavaScript-based rich client for mail and calendaring, in the style of GMail. Those of you who follow my blog may have noticed me waxing optimistic about the power of web clients over the last few months; even before maps.google.com came out and blew everyone’s mind.
I searched for weeks to find an open source project that is working on implementing an open source version of GMail. I even posted to Google answers looking for one. It doesn’t exist. Well, today we’re starting one, and we’re inviting the world’s crack JavaScript/DHTML hackers to help us.
It looks like this is something I should get involved in when I have a little more time on my hands.
Kris: isn’t this exactly what you’ve been looking for?
February 16th, 2005 at 3:53 pm
Yes, there are a few other projects with similar architectures (IMAP ACLs, WebDAV etc.) each with its own set of pros and cons. I’ve only had a quick look, but I would rate Hula’s strengths as a strong data model, scalability and a web client that is almost certainly going to be rather good. Drawbacks at the moment are, no Outlook support on the client side and no LDAP support in the backend. Outlook could probably be made to play nicely via a third party plugin (such as Troltek’s) and the LDAP support will come via their MDB API. This is is certainly going to be a significant project, largely because of the people involved.
P.S. Love the Novell icons in the Admin Guide, takes me right back.