Pulse, Summer of Code, Zukunft

I’ve got some exciting stuff brewing with Pulse, my pangalactic project tracker. But I’m stashing things away on for a short while. Phil Bull, Milo Casagrande, Paul Cutler, and I are attending Writing Open Source: The Conference in June. (More on that in a soonish blog post.)  What this means is that Mallard needs to be working in Yelp by June 11, so Pulse is getting momentarily shelved.

Summer of Code

Just because I’m shelving Pulse doesn’t mean it won’t be worked on.  Florian Ludwig has been accepted to work on Pulse for the Google Summer of Code.  Congratulations to Florian.  While I won’t be doing a lot of active Pulse hacking, I will do my best to be a good mentor.

Florian is going to work on integrating bug tracker support into Pulse.  The obvious bug tracker is bugzilla.gnome.org, but the goal in Pulse is to have a generalized framework.  Hopefully we’ll be able to build on his work to link Pulse up to other bug trackers.

Architecture

Recently, I split all of Pulse’s module-processing code up into small plugins.  I’m really happy with the result.  After the refactoring, I was able to add support for the Evolution Quick Reference Card with a 250-line plugin.  (Don’t be fooled by what you see on gnome.org.  Activity and translations do actually work.  I just don’t have all the data uploaded.)

This got me thinking of how I could do the same thing to the front end.  What I’ve been toying around with is splitting all the tabs of pages off into separate applications.  So there would be, for instance, an application that provides the fancy activity graph page for modules and documents and people and whatever else.

The way it exists in my head, applications will be able to interact in ways other than just adding tabs.  One thing I was thinking of was an application to add notes to any object.  Hopefully I can remember what I was doing when I come back to it in a couple months.

Zukunft

So where this is all heading is Pulse becoming a bit more active as a collaboration tool.  It still has a very strong emphasis on automatic tracking, and always will.  But I’m starting to think of ways it can be extended to meet different people’s needs.  I think I’ve stumbled into creating a really nice tool, and I’d like to see it grow.