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 Posted by Navindra Umanee on Friday 15/Jun/2001, @10:59from the infuse-this dept. A few days ago, Infusion (screenshots) was announced on apps.kde.com. Along with Citadel/UX serving as backend, Infusion aspires to compete with the likes of Aethera, Magellan, Evolution, and yes, Microsoft Outlook+Exchange. Is Infusion there yet? Nope. But from what I've seen, I've certainly been impressed by Citadel/UX, and once I managed to get Infusion compiled, I was able to enjoy some neat functionality. Coupled with the enthusiam of author Brian Ledbetter, it would seem that Infusion is going places. Read on for further details of my Infusion experience and for an interesting interview with the author. Update: 06/16 03:30 AM by N: Art wrote in with some interesting comments on the upcoming version(s) of Citadel. A Little Test DriveMost of the packages I needed to compile Citadel+Infusion were readily available with the Mandrake 8.0 Standard Edition, with the exception of of libical which I obtained from rpmfind.net. Unfortunately, the build experience itself left something to be desired with less than optimal configure scripts and minor source bugs. No doubt the problematic compiler from Red Hat 7.x included with Mandrake 8.0 also had a hand in the matter. After several source and makefile "adjustments" however, I managed to get Citadel, libCxClient and Infusion all installed and working. Despite all this, I should note that my efforts were nothing compared to the pain and tragedy I've witnessed fellow colleagues go through while installing (or re-installing) Exchange -- things can only get better from here.Citadel/UX's BBS roots are almost immediately apparent, although the setup is fairly painless to a seasoned Unix user. Simply run the setup script, create a sysop account, login and then create the basic configuration. A good idea at this point is to create a couple of test users for Infusion. Citadel/UX is pretty impressive, including such things as SMTP and POP servers in the package. Citadel can send mail between local users, send and receive internet mail, and make mail available to internet users. This brilliant arrangement means that, as far as mail is concerned, any diehard Mutt user such as myself can happily coexist on a Citadel/UX network with Infusion users. Brian had a good idea when he chose to base Infusion on Citadel/UX. One might even ask why other Open Source projects such as Aethera and Evolution don't consider improving and sharing this capable backend. I was able to test basic Infusion functionality with 2 test users. I could mail back and forth, I could send mail to an internet account, I could receive internet mail, and I could view shared areas. Infusion also has chat capabilities and token organizer/notes functionality which I did not fully investigate. Infusion is evidently here both in concept and proof-of-concept, including the expected bugs. The colourful interface will surely evolve to please many in the future. So should you rush out and download Infusion? No. Set your expectations too high, and you will be disappointed. Infusion is still at the early stages, but if you enjoy tinkering, or you're a developer who can help, or you or your company has an interest in collaboration systems, then check this out. Want more? There's more. Get the facts below from author Brian Ledbetter who was kind enough to answer a few questions. Talking To The AuthorHow robust is Infusion/Citadel, and what kind of environment have you used it it in?Infusion by itself is actually not a very capable application, and is still in the early stages of development. Right now, Infusion is tied in to the Citadel/UX backend 100%, kinda like how most of the components in Microsoft Outlook are only useful with an Exchange server in the backend. I envision the ability to add plug-ins for SMTP/IMAP/etc. ala Outlook sometime in the future, however. The Citadel/UX Communications Server is a promising platform. While many of the newest features are still in the development stage, it is currently a rather powerful communications platform. It's had over 10 years (actually, almost 25 years, if you count the old non-UNIX variants) of development behind it. There are sites currently running Citadel/UX which have thousands of users, with a large number (I'm probably not the best person to ask here) of concurrent users accessing the system. How does Infusion compete with Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, Aethera/Magellan/KMail, Evolution etc. Infusion is a direct competitor of any MUA (mail-user-agent), though due to how early in development I am, it's not all that capable yet. Specifically, Infusion is aimed at competing directly with other group-scheduling packages, such as Microsoft Outlook and Evolution. The Citadel/UX server is aimed at offering a powerful group-scheduling or internet service server similar to Microsoft Exchange Server. The maintainer of this project is Art J. Cancro; see the Citadel/UX webpage for more information. Do you see Infusion/Citadel being used to communicate cross-platform and with other (possibly non-Citadel) clients? Any client can access a Citadel/UX server via a standardized library, libCxClient, which will soon be a part of the official Citadel/UX project (I'm maintaining it until then). Also, end-users can access Citadel/UX through standardized protocols -- It communicates via SMTP and POP3, currently, with full IMAP support on the way. Like I have said, I plan on adding 'hooks' to Infusion to allow it to communicate with other backend servers. This is still on the drawing-board only, though. I've been given to understand that Infusion currently shares some code with other KDE apps such as KOrganizer or KNotes. What are your plans for future integration with the rest of KDE? Infusion currently shares some code with KOrganizer, but after discussions with the head of the KOrganizer project, Cornelius Schumacher, I will be stripping the code out and utilizing the KParts API exported by KOrganizer instead. This way, we have a standardized KDE calendaring component, without having to maintain two seperate portions of code. As far as the notes go, Infusion has only native-code, with me referencing the KNotes source for hints. :) What previous development experience have you had? Why did you start this project? Have you been doing this project in your spare time? What were your experiences while developing for KDE/Qt? Actually, Infusion is my first try at writing a GUI-based application. The KDE libraries have made this much easier than I ever thought it could've been, even without using tools like KDevelop. As far as past experience, I've not really done anything of note in the open source world. I've been working in the software industry for about 5 years now (mostly web application development, which, after writing real software, doesn't seem all that impressive ;). I've worked for a few companies during this timeframe, though my employment has generally gravitated towards web software development. The Infusion project is currently done entirely in my spare time, what little bit of it I have. According to my CVS logs, which vaguely resemble my memory, Infusion was first checked in on November 17, 2000. It's gone through quite a few changes since then. I hope that before too long, it can prove to be a valuable addition to any enterprise seeking an affordable groupware platform. I certainly hope to use this project to prove undoubtably that UNIX can be as user-friendly as it is powerful. Anything else you'd like to add/comment on? KDE rocks! If I were to try developing Infusion in GTK (I did, actually, but scrapped it almost immediately after beginning), it would've taken twice as long as it has, and it would've been substantially larger. I would like to offer my sincerest and most gracious thank you to all of the KDE developers out there, who have given us such a wonderful development (and user) environment for UNIX! < | >
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