Event details

Merging Horde Groupware with jQuery Mobile

von Jan Schneider (The Horde Project)

Saturday, 26.05.2012, Europa I, 14:45-15:30 Uhr

Horde Groupware is the web-based groupware solution of the Horde Project with the long history of over a decade, providing groupware services to millions of users on a daily basis. Core part of the groupware is the webmail client IMP, the foundation of this suite. Written in PHP, the webmail client and the groupware have evolved with this programming language and the overall progress in web development.

From the mostly static web pages of the very first versions to the AJAX-enabled user interfaces of recent releases, we have come a long way. The next logical step was to improve the experience for the growing numbers of users with mobile devices like smartphones and tablet computers. Besides the support for ActiveSync synchronization, we wanted a better experience when accessing Horde Groupware directly with mobile browsers too. At the same time the jQuery team started working on the jQuery Mobile toolkit. jQuery Mobile is a JavaScript UI toolkit built on top of the popular jQuery JavaScript framework. It provides user interface elements to progressively enhance simple HTML 5 pages based on the browser's capabilities.

Horde 4.0 shipped a first simple, read-only version of this jQuery Mobile frontend for Horde. With the most recent Horde version 5.0 it has been extended to a full-featured webmail client, with everything a user needs for his daily mail work literally at the tips of his finger.

In this talk I am going to show how we got these two distinct frameworks together, which problems we met, and how much you can gain from well-designed web frameworks.

Über den Autor Jan Schneider:

Jan Schneider entwickelt Webanwendungen und Lernsoftware seit dem Jahr 1998.
Zusammen mit ehemaligen Kommilitonen gründet er 2001 die AMMMa AG in Bielefeld und produziert Content-Management-Systeme und Lernsoftware für Schulbuchverlage, Bildungs- und Landeseinrichtungen.
Seit 2004 arbeitet er als freiberuflicher Software-Entwickler und -Consultant, vor allem für das Horde Projekt, dessen Mitglied er seit dem Jahr 2001 ist.
Zusammen mit Weggefährten aus dem Projekt gründet Jan Schneider 2010 die Horde LLC, eine US-amerikanische Firma, die sich der Weiterentwicklung des Horde Projektes und der professionellen Unterstützung der Horde Software verschrieben hat.