Category: PFTCR

“beta” PicoLibre/PicoForge Debian packages

Christian has just issued some new PicoLibre/PicoForge packages in order to be able to get more tests on a hopefully much more phpgroupware-compliant code.

Nothing spectacular so far, but a major rewrite of many picolibre modules in phpGroupware, which should easy a lot maintainability (and enhance security).

Next steps :

  • Integration of subversion in addition to CVS in the picolibre-backend, protected through chroot jail, with SSH and LDAP. It’s almost ready and should be in a testable state next week…
  • Integration of TWiki : some bits are almost ready too : we should be able to use a LDAP plugin in TWiki to be able to use the LDAP users and groups of PicoLibre, and a new phpgroupware application is currently being written to allow project’s wikis creation…

I hope that we will be able to test all that on the production platforms at INT and ENST Bretagne soon (before the Hephaistos and phpGroupware confs in november).

For the installation instructions, for the curious : more details in the CVS

RecentChanges in Picolibre…

There have been several recent efforts around Picolibre at INT. Maybe they will attract some interest of the curious ones. We hope they will help enhance phpGroupware quite a bit.

Reminder : more details on what Picolibre is may be found here, but quite old [en] and more recent here [fr].

  • Picolibre packaged for Debian : not really new, as I blogged about that earlier ([fr]), but mostly working for our needs ;). It’s not an official packaging yet, but Picolibre is not meant to fit every system configuration anyway, as it requires pretty much control of all the system (users and groups through LDAP for CVS, etc.)… but who knows, some day, we could make some regular packages and go for official package ?
  • After having made the packaging, Christian is also working on rewriting some PicoLibre components so that they are much more object oriented, and maintainable. Cool ;).
  • Picolibre should fit in a Shibboleth network, to allow single sign-on, as we (actually students doing their internship here) have developped adapters for Shibboleth for phpGroupware. Using these mechanisms we can more easily integrate the platforms with enterprise networks, using external auth sources, and have SSO, as well as integrate several Picolibre platforms : one developer may do single sign-on when working on different projects hosted on different platforms. Next step is to integrate several kinds of platforms, like picolibre, gforge, sf, etc. ? 😉
  • Picolibre may be using soon Subversion (SVN) instead of CVS, which will allow users to get more advanced mechanisms, and another of the students in internship here has been working on integrating the phpgroupware filemanager with SVN. SVN can be accessed as a DAV server, so he added some modifications to be able to manage documents on a versioned DAV server, with this new SVN backend. The goal is to offer users of the platform ways to manage versioned information even if they don’t understand SVN and wouldn’t know how to use it or install its client programs. It may also be useful for the remote user. And using a DAV client on SVN in autocommit mode is pretty interesting too for the average user… wtill being able to access the history through the filemanager. Nice addons to phpgroupware to come when it will be ready.
  • Last thing : one of the students has worked on integration of PicoLibre and TWiki, to be able to offer wikis for the hosted projects in addition to the other tools. It may also use bits of what was done for the shibbolethisation, for managing user mappings between these applications.

That was it : Picolibre is not dead, although most of this work is happening behind the scene, and not everything has been published yet… but we expect to be able to release some of these elements in next phpgroupware versions, and published a new release of PicoLibre in the future. More testing and coding is awaiting us still ;).

I hope we have enough time to document all that also… and maybe submit some articles about that to the Hepahaistos conference ?.

Hphastos Conference : First International Conference on Open Source Collaborative Development Platforms

I’ve just been informed that the Hphastos Conference will be organized next november in Paris.

Here, you will find more details, including the CFP (first deadline : September 15th, 2006) : http://www.ethiqa.com/hephaistos/

Paper published in International Journal of Information Technology and Web Engineering

We have written last year a paper titled “Integration of Libre Software Applications to Create a Collaborative Work Platform for Researchers at GET“, which has just been published in a special issue of the International Journal of Information Technology and Web Engineering (IJITWE) focused on “Web-based Community Driven Open Source Systems” (Vol. 1, Issue 3, 2006).

Here’s the abstract :

Libre software provides powerful applications ready to be integrated for the build up of platforms for internal use in organisations. We describe the architecture of the collaborative work platform which we have integrated and designed for researchers at GET. We present the elements we have learned during this project in particular, with respect to contribution to external libre projects, in order to better ensure the maintainability of the internal applications, and to phpGroupware as a framework for specific applications development.

You may find more details at : http://www.idea-group.com/articles/details.asp?ID=6313 (and yes, the paper is only accessible for a fee 🙁 ) Meanwhile, you may find a copy of parts of the draft, here.

Transparents intervention Autour du Libre 2006 : “Rsum rapide de quelques travaux en Gnie Logiciel sur le logiciel libre”

Je suis intervenu lors de Autour du Libre 2006 la semaine dernire Brest, pour y faire une prsentation rapide de quelques rsultats en matire de recherche acadmique sur le Logiciel Libre, et plus spcifiquement du ct gnie logiciel.

Je tiens remercier Gregorio Robles qui m’a permis d’utiliser une grande partie des figures que j’ai prsentes, qui sont issues de son mmoire de thse de doctorat portant sur l’analyse du logiciel libre, qu’il a soutenue rcemment.

Voici le lien vers les slides que j’ai prsents : en PDF, et le source en OpenOffice.org (attention, gros document). Update : une version anglaise des slides est disponible.