PHP Meeting in Cambridge 5/5/05

[Greg Rundlett]

Paul Lussier wrote:

>Greg Rundlett <greg at freephile.com> writes:
>
>  
>
>>Horde is both a piece of software and a project. The Horde Project
>>comprises a set of Web-based productivity, messaging, and
>>project-management applications. The Horde Framework is a common
>>code-base used by Horde applications, including libraries and a common
>>user interface.
>>    
>>
>
>Wow, I didn't even know Horde was still around.  I vaguely remember
>doing something with this a few years ago.  I think they had a
>web-based IMAP client or something.  But the rest of the Horde suite
>was vaporware.  So, what's the current status of this project, what
>are they doing, and are they ever going to finish?
>
>  
>
The Horde certainly has been around for a long time.  I am no expert in 
the history and status of the project (in fact I just recently took a 
renewed interest in it), but they have already released a (polished) 3.0 
milestone, and have dozens of real, finished applications that all work 
together with a common framework and API.  Their webmail project (called 
IMP) is used by either Harvard or MIT (maybe both?), and I was recently 
interviewing with a company that is developing commercial webmail based 
on Horde (the Horde code is LGPL'd)  There are now probably thousands of 
horde/IMP installations around the world, and the code is translated in 
many languages.  Recently, the horde syncml library was adopted by other 
projects as a 'standard' that different projects are collaborating on 
instead of each one re-inventing the wheel --  which is nice to see.

What makes horde somewhat unique from other leading 'groupware / 
framework' projects like Tiki or egroupware is that it is most 
tightly-integrated with PEAR (and so follows the same coding standards, 
can be installed via pear packager etc.)  See pear.php.net for more on 
pear.   And, I guess one other distinguishing factor is that Chuck works 
for Zend Technologies which puts him right at the heart of open source 
with a business model.

So, basically the Horde has certainly arrived, and is here to stay.  
More info at www.horde.org (and there are several mailing lists).  Like 
all good technologies, it will never be finished, but rather always 
improving ;-)

- Greg