Quick report from OSLC meetup in Paris last week

Last week, as part of the COCLICO project‘s efforts to work on forges interoperability issues, we invited partners and contacts for a short meetup in Paris, with a special guest, Steve Speicher, lead of the OSLC-CM domain work-group.

Steve was in Paris to speak at the Open World Forum 2010 in the forges interoperability track. As time slots at OWF were quite short, we proposed to have this meetup a few days earlier to be able to have more detailed discussions and demos.

Steve has presented the following slides : OSLC Specifications for Interoperability and a screencast of AJAX interaction between an OSLC-CM server and a consumer.

On our side, we made a quick demo (a screencast actually) of our Mantis add-on for OSLC-CM.

We have discussed several technical aspects of OSLC, and also the community of actors working on the specifications. Regarding the french speaking community, there doesn’t seem to be an urgent need to have a specific structure setup so far, but we will nevertheless probably continue sharing content in french whenever we have some time.

I’ve been very glad to meet Steve, and hopefully, there are gonna be other times for new meetups. Why not a formal OSLC conference some day ?

In the meantime, feel free to tell us if you’d like to discuss OSLC and forges interoperability.

Repost of “Open Source OSLC-CM implementations in PHP”

Reposting from : Open Source OSLC-CM implementations in PHP posted on Helios project’s blog at SF.net :

Steve Speicher at IBM/Rational has blogged about OSLC reference implementations and test suites.

He’s been kind to link to our implementation, which uses Zend framework in PHP, and will provide an Open Source OSLC-CM V1 server component for the Open Source Mantis bugtracker (and later for FusionForge trackers too).

I hope people can learn how OSLC-CM V1 works, by testing with a Mantis 1.2 installation plus our server add-on, and by looking at our server’s code (and maybe, then decide to use it in production too, of course).

More at https://sourceforge.net/apps/wordpress/heliosplatform/2010/06/17/open-source-oslc-cm-implementations-in-php/

New OAuth plugin for Mantis

I’ve been working on implementing a (my first) plugin for Mantis to provide OAuth support in Mantis.

I now have a first 0.5 version that may be tested. More details here.

Nest step will be to try and use it for the OSLC-CM REST server add-on for Mantis, to allow clients to connect to the REST API using OAuth Access Tokens.

New SF.net project for HELIOS

The Helios project is gradually going more open, as we start releasing and committing in the open into a SF.net project (heliosplatform).

Among the tools offered by SF.net we will use a blog (wordpress), the wiki (mediawiki) and the SVN, for a start.

The project’s SVN repo will be populated with all components we have developed, as we progressively switch our SVN hosting. The first piece we have committed is the Mantis OSLC REST server module.

Some news of our efforts around OSLC-CM and future plans

OSLC-CM V1 is a proposed standard for REST APIs of bugtrackers, and in our seek for more interoperability in the bugtracker space, we’ve been very interested in it.

OSLC-CM is quite young and only so far implemented in proprietary tools (although elaborated in an open way) on the server side, and as we believe in FLOSS, we’ve started trying to implement basics of server side plugins for a few bugtrackers.
In addition to a demo server that’s simulating the behaviour of a bugtracker, we have started implementing a Mantis plugin and FusionForge and Codendi trackers add-ons (all PHP and based on Zend framework, see this project on picoforge). All are very basic, but we hope they will be the basis for future OSLC-CM compatible servers in these tools.

At the same time we’ve been experimenting with the code already published in Mylyn to support OSLC-CM on the client side. Not everything is public yet in Mylyn, as the elements that have been developped for some connectors of Tasktop to the proprietary tools are being ported to the open source code of Mylyn.
We have thus been able to use the Junit tests classes of Mylyn and tweak them in a way to connect to an instance of the demo server for Mantis (including handling some Basic auth), and be able to retrieve the first bugs descriptions 🙂

Now that this works, we’ll try and add some Java code (maybe reusing Mylyn client libs) to doc4 (being developped as part of Helios) in order to start linking doc4 and Mantis so that this can be used in the Helios platform. This may involve mixing code of XWiki and Mylyn… hmmm… well, we’ll see.

Next steps may be also to try and implement a connector in Python that might be used in tools like bts-link.

Then whichever Python or Java client libraries we have, will allow us to use them inside FetchBugs4.me to connect and harvest bugs of OSLC-CM compliant bugtrackers eventually.

Lots of interesting developments ahead. Stay tuned.