Category: Uncategorized

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.

New paper on observation of contributions in forges through standard feeds

Just a quick word to mention the paper published at SITIS 2009 by our collegue Vu.

Biblio entry : DANG Quang Vu, BAC Christian, BERGER Olivier, VLASCEANU Valentin, Supporting situation awareness in FLOSS projects by semantical aggregation of tools feeds. The 5th International Conference on Signal Image Technology and Internet Based Systems (SITIS’09), 29 november – 04 december 2009, Marrakech, Morocco, 2009

At all good libraries soon 😉

Here’s the abstract :

It is rather difficult to monitor or visualize what can be the contribution of a member in a collaboration project, especially when the project uses multiple tools to produce its results. This is the case for collaborative development of FLOSS software, that uses Wiki, bug tracker, mailing lists and source code management tools. This paper presents an approach to data collection by using aggregation of feeds published by the different tools of a software forge. To allow this aggregation, collected data is semantically reformatted into Semantic Web standards: RDF, DC, DOAP, FOAF and EvoOnt. Resulting data can then be processed, re-published or displayed to project members. We implemented this approach in a supervision module that has been integrated into the PicoForge platform. This module is able to draw a live graph of the social community out of the different sources of data, and in turn exports semantic feeds for other uses.

RIP twiki in Debian

The twiki package has been removed from Debian.

The package was not really maintained, and twiki’s maintenance still required some attention, as there were quite a lot security issues. So the removal is logical.

I had tried and help maintain it in good shape, but couldn’t do much recently, as we’ve moved a little bit away from its inegration in PicoForge, having other matters to care for in Helios and Coclico these days.

Maybe foswiki (the more open fork of twiki) will enter Debian some day. The ITP is there, and there are unofficial packages to be tested, for those that would need to transition from the previous installations of twiki on Debian. More details in the fowsiki ITP.

Anyway, thanks for all the good work to all those who spent time working on TWiki’s packages in Debian.

As for me, maybe some day, I’ll be interested in contributing some time to Foswiki, should we deploy it alongside FusionForge some day.

First release (0.1) of a far from complete OSLC-CM V1 demo server

We’re working on implementing a demo/test server for the OSLC-CM V1 protocol, in order to help test client tools.

We’ve released (under a BSD license) a first 0.1 preliminary version that only supports GET queries, that’ll lead the way to an expected complete demo server of OSLC-CM V1 when the 1.0 version will be finished.

At the moment, it will only provide a minimal REST implementation of a PHP server using zend, and will produce JSON or XML/RDF views of fictionnal bugs contructed out of contents of a CSV file.

More details may be found at : https://picoforge.int-evry.fr/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Oslc/Web/, whereas the code is in the Download page there.

COCLICO started : many interesting development in forges ahead of us in the 2 coming years

We have started the COCLICO project this friday, with a meeting grouping many actors coming from various french regions, that operate in the area of open source forges (around FusionForge, NovaForge, Codendi, Trac, PicoForge, etc.). It’s a “Pôle de Compétitivité” (french R&D clusters) project which is funded by french public agencies, under the frame of both the FLOSS thematic group of System@tic (Paris) and Minalogic (Grenoble).

COCLICO will last 2 years and will let us all collaborate on producing FLOSS components that should allow much more interoperability between the open source forges, and probably deliver interesting standards that should allow to integrate forges with more tools in order to support new uses. We have no website yet, but it will be setup next week.

Of course a collaboration project with many companies (with various profiles, from the single consultant to the very large corporations) and academics is always requiring some effort so that everyone collaborates, but we have a strong focus on producing code as first steps, and I’m quite confident we all believe that FLOSS is necessary to share the innovation efforts.

I hope it will be a great occasion to bring interesting new things in the FLOSS ecosystem, and that we’ll manage to let others participate even if they are not funded by COCLICO, since one of the goals of the project is to bring momentum in the general forges ecosystem.

As far as we’re concerned at Institut TELECOM, we’re leading two workpackages on interoperability and community/ecosystem.

I’m very excited about this project, which together with our running Helios project should allow us to contribute in a significant way to FLOSS development tools and to the general quality of the FLOSS development process.

Expect more spamming from me about forges in the future on this blog 😉

Update : we now have a website both with more details in french (including a description of the project’s work-packages) and in english (still empty at the moment, working on it).