The Chandler Project: Not Dead Yet

by Mike Gunderloy - Aug. 11, 2008Comments (2)

The Chandler Project has been around for a long time. How long? Long enough for a book to be written about it; long enough to be used as a bad example of how to run a project; long enough to be cited as evidence that dynamic languages can't scale. And yet...despite setbacks and revisions, the project never went away. Last week, version 1.0 of the "note-to-self organizer" software shipped.

Certainly, the original vision for Chandler, back when it was started as one of Mitch Kapor's projects, hasn't come to pass: "a new application to manage personal information including notes, mail, tasks, appointments and events, contacts, documents and other personal resources" What they've delivered instead is a combination online/offline to-do list and scheduling application, with some interesting synching hooks and connections to other projects. But this doesn't make the project a failure.

In fact, it's possible to argue that Chandler is a good example of an open-source success story. They've shipped software; they've built a community; and they've contributed code to a good many other projects. When the project reorganized in January, with the announced departure of Mitch Kapor, some folks assumed that it would just collapse entirely. Instead, they drove some software to release, and by all appearances they're still fired up to keep building on it.

Chandler 1.0 is, as I cover over on Web Worker Daily, a reasonably credible piece of software. Congratulations to the team on shipping, and I hope they can move forward from here to deliver, incrementally, on the original vision.