Just shy of three months ago, I wrote about the new direction of OpenCLAWS and the path I envisioned us taking. The schedule was very optimistic especially considering the unknowns that have yet to be conquered. We’ve hit a major milestone and I thought it’d be good to share the project’s current status, and next steps.

About a month later than I had hoped, OpenCLAWS is publicly available for download from our Subversion repository. I spent about two and a half months scrubbing the source tree in preparation for public use. It was a long process. I had to learn about the design and flow of each component, and then go about refactoring wherever needed. The end result is the removal of a lot dead AMS code, consolidation of duplicate functionality, bug fixes, and standardized coding conventions.
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Nearly three years ago I joined the CLAWS development team, wide-eyed and eager to contribute. At the time, there was four of us, sparse documentation, and a giant list of features to implement. The team relied heavily on “tribal knowledge” and had a very wide latitude for making design decisions.

I only worked in that position for a few months, but that experience gave me valuable insight into the software’s design and implementation. After returning to the customer support side of ITS, I continued my involvement with the project by testing what I could and reporting bugs and feature requests. Later I successfully built and installed CLAWS in my own environment.
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