[Owncloud] My feedback about ownCloud 5

[Thomas Tanghus]

On Wednesday 05 June 2013 16:06 Tornóci László wrote:
> Yes, there are some 
> really frustrating problems, like you cannot tell the program which 
> addressbook to put a new contact to (makes the use of multiple 
> addressbooks and sharing of them impossible).

This[1] is indeed one of the regressions the contacts app has after 
implementing the groups abstraction layer for ownCloud 5, and it is my top-
priority for backporting besides being able to move contacts between address 
books [2].

For ownCloud 5 my main goals was:

- Rewrite the client-side code to be maintainable - the pace we had moved in 
until that, had left it with some seriously bad code which needed cleaning up.
- Use a more intuitive notion of groups, where a contact can be in several 
groups, with the hopes of giving the end user less restrictions in the way 
contacts can be organized.

>From the developers point of view - me ;) - this has succeeded as it is now 
much easier to catch bugs, and new features can be implemented easier. From 
the users pov there has been some obvious regressions as mentioned above.

During the dot releases since 5.0 I have hopefully ironed out the confirmed 
actual bugs (if not, you know what to do) which leaves me room to:

- Backport the the address book issues.
- Finish the redesign of the backend for oC 6.

The backporting is the top-most priority, as ownCloud 5 will be around and 
maintained for quite some time, and these features are needed for all but the 
most trivial use cases. I hope to have it ready for 5.0.8.
The backend redesign is at an almost steady state, and will have many 
advantages compared to the current state:

- Allow for other backends than the current local database, e.g. LDAP (which 
is being worked on).
- Better/easier permission checking.
- Much FASTER local access, less db queries, no CPU spikes for trivial 
operations ;)

And the frontend code has of course also seen improvements, so there will be 
no endless requests for contact thumbnails, and in general a lot less ajax 
requests.

[1] https://github.com/owncloud/contacts/issues/44
[2] https://github.com/owncloud/contacts/issues/57

-- 
Med venlig hilsen / Best Regards

Thomas Tanghus