Josiah pointed out that, for the TODO application I'm seeking to make, there make be some existing backends that do what I want. Prior to him mentioning that, I hadn't discovered any that seemed to be a good match. But the prospect of doing less work inspired me to look harder :-)

In my stumbling around, I ran across OpenGroupware. Most of us heard about this as a possible MS Exchange killer when it was made available as Open Source some time ago. At that point, it wasn't quite ready for use, so it went into heavy development and most of us never gave it a second thought. Well, it's about to hit 1.0 now believe it or not.

The idea behind OpenGroupware is that it's a server, running behind Apache, that can be accessed by other clients. It comes with it's own web interface, but other clients work fine -- Evolution, Mozilla, even Outlook if you pay a few bucks for a plugin.

It looks like they've been trying to make it flexible. There are several modules available for accessing it's external API (via XML-RPC), including PHP, Java, and Perl. Though, as a side rant, I have to say that I've been a bit dissapointed in Perl support for a lot of the new apps that come out. It used to be that whenever a new app was available, if there were a way to interface with it, Perl would be right on top of that. Two apps I've been excited about lately, OpenGroupware and DBus, do in fact have Perl modules -- but they seem to be very alpha-ish, and not officially supported by the project or even mentioned on the website. I'm not sure if these projects are just uninteresting to Perl developers, if other language developers are simply getting things done faster, or if we're seeing a lesser amount of Perl developers.

Anyhow, OpenGroupware is both flexible and complex. There's a lot to it. And one of the problems of it not being in the limelight is that -- as a terrible catch-22 -- there's a lot of rough edges that really slow me as a new developer down. Documentation is minimal, it can be tricky to install, and I need to learn how things work in general. There is apparently a way to add custom fields, so that I can turn the TODO items into a tree instead of a flat 2d list. I'll also need to be able to add ACL items to each piece of data in the list. It appears to support all this.

I did get it running on my laptop, but I spent two days of troubleshooting to find out that it just doesn't work with Apache2. Or at least, something about my version of Apache2, others have it working with that just fine.

Alas, it's going to take me weeks to get all the OpenGroupware stuff down. I'm excited to try it sometime, but I'm going to modify the order I do this in.

To get my TODO list application up and running, I'm going to build it to support a single backend database, which is straight forward. Once I have the ideas buzzing through my mind hashed out, and this actually works using a server I'm familar with -- we can migrate it to the more powerful OpenGroupware server. Or who knows, maybe we can support both.

I do have a basic curses interface working. This is my first experience developing with it. It took me awhile to get it to this point -- of course this is partly due to my learning curve, but again I'm noticing a huge difficiency in the usefulness of the Perl modules. I spoke with the authors about this -- they said they've been really busy and suggested themselves that there was a lot to be done. I've fixed a few of these issues so far, and hopefully I'll have some useful patches to offer shortly.

I had quite seriously considered writing this in another language which had existing and complete curses widget libaries -- not C, but maybe Python, Ruby, or OCaml. I still may switch, but again one thing at a time :-) What's a high level language with a decent library for developing curses widgets?