For Developers

Chandler is an open source project, which means that we are looking for others who are interested in helping with design and construction of Chandler. Chandler is also a platform for applications involving personal information. This means that there are many possibilities for developers of all skill levels to participate. Here are several ways that developers can work with Chandler, in order of easiest to hardest:

1. Write an import/export plugin. In order for Chandler to be useful, it will need to be able to exchange information with other applications. Chandler has an extensible import/export mechanism which is based on plugins. Writing plugins for your favorite application or data format would be a great contribution.
2. Build a Chandler parcel. A parcel is a self contained bundle of functionality, much like a Firefox plugin.
3. Work directly on a part of Chandler itself.

Documentation

Here is some documentation to help you get started developing with Chandler. We have an overview of Chandler's architecture that will help you get acquainted with all the parts of the application and platform. You should read this overview no matter how you plan to work on Chandler. You should also read the Schema API tutorial as well.

There is a bunch of material on writing a parcel, including a tutorial and some reference materials. There are also several example parcels included in the Chandler code base.

If you are interested in working on the main Chandler code base, you should look at the various technical specifications to get an idea of how things work in the subsystem of interest. We don't have specs for all parts of the system, so if you get stuck you should just send an e-mail to the Chandler development mailing list.

We are now in the 0.7alpha releases. The For Developers page will point to http://chandler.osafoundation.org/docs/0.7/... which are work-in-progress transitioning from 0.6 to 0.7.

Architecture Overview

• Chandler Architecture

Tutorials

• Writing an Import/Export plugin
• An example parcel: Feeds
• Schema API Tutorial
• Creating Startup and Background Tasks in Chandler

Reference Materials

• Licensing Terms - Chandler 0.7alpha4 is available under the Apache 2.0 license.
• Planning specifications - These are the specifications for the features that we are targeting for our next (0.7) release.
• API documentation -- The API documentation.
• Quick reference to available schema types - A brief tour of the schema types that you can use.
• Full schema documentation -- The schema documentation.

Getting Chandler

You have a few choices when deciding what to download, depending on what you plan on doing with Chandler, and whether you want a version built from the absolute newest code or one that has gone through testing by people. For links to the various versions of Chandler go the the Getting Chandler wiki page.