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/

LD2SD, Helios and Linked Data / SemWeb extracted from development forges

We have received a visitor from DERI last week (PhD student Aftab Iqbal) who’s researching integration of facts about software development tools into Linked Data in order to provide interesting “semantic mashups” of data into IDEs like Eclipse (see his slides). Quite interesting is the choice of ontologies and the results integrated in an Eclipse plugin made available to developers.

This approach is quite similar to the one we practice in the core of the Helios platform (still under development) to integrate data coming from different FLOSS ALM tools in order to create dashboards offering a consolidated view of software (maintenance) process.
Maybe the difference is that Helios does this internally inside a “self-contained” platform whereas the potential of LD2SD presented by Aftab is to do the same on the Web of Linked Data.

Also, in Helios, there are other contributions made for the Mandriva distribution (with links with projects like Scribo and Nepomuk to which Mandriva is also participating) in the form of the doc4.mandriva.org, in order to aggregate, this time, not facts at the “project” level, but for a meta-project (a GNU/Linux distribution) that are quite interesting. See Stéphane Laurière’s slides for details.

We’re also experimenting in the frame of the COCLICO project on producing RDFa data about software development projects hosted in FusionForge instances. (see our progress tracked through this FusionForge feature request). First candidates are project’s DOAP profiles and developer’s FOAF ones, and lots of SIOC to glue it all, and of course other informations relating to a Forge ontology that we’re proposing in COCLICO.

With recent announcements that Mylyn is investing a lot in OSLC, and OSLC being based on RDF, and the advent of the Semantic Desktop starting to emerge (in KDE mainly) on top of Nepomuk, this brings great promises for a great Semantic future.

Working on standard forge exchange format

As part of COCLICO, we’re working on an exchange format for forges, that should help dump, restore, export and import from different software forges.

There are various use cases for this, like moving a project from one forge to another, but also as backup/restore feature for forge admins. More about the rationale here.

We’d like this format to be a standard some day, so it should have good properties so that it’s generic enough and at the same time easy to adopt. Thus it would be relatively easy to contribute new exporters or importers to an framework (for which we’ll implement basic core tools), while having a long-lasting format that can still be used in the future.

A lot of work ahead of us, and this is just a short notice in case you’re interested and you’d like to know more 😉

Stay tuned, and if interested, join discussions@planetforge.org to discuss this topic.

P.S.: yes, it’s a rebirth of CoopX, somehow (see the coopx tag in my blog for more details)

Forges meeting report (COCLICO + fusionforge + codendi + others)

I’ve just returned from a 2 days public meeting (plus 1 COCLICO internal meeting) held in Issy-Les-Moulineaux at Orange R&D about forges.

The meeting was organised by the COCLICO partners and welcomed the first FusionForge meeting, as well as other interested forges developers and users from Codendi, novaforge, nforge, sourcesup, etc.

The generic content was a mix of informal discussions, and technical presentations (and debates) in order to try and improve collaboration and interoperability among these forges. A proposal that has emerged from the discussions is to try and use more than today the PlanetForge RSS agregator and wiki (and lists), as an open community gathering people from various forges, in order to improve shared knowledge, inform of ongoing developments and more generally favour collaboration of tools.

On FusionForge side, there were many more precise discussions on topics like roadmap, organization, release, quality process, governance, marketing, contributions, packaging, etc.

There will probably be more detailed reports, but I should express my thanks to all those who came (sometimes from abroad, like Korea and Germany) to make this a very fruitful meeting.

We intend to held such meetings every now and then, and maybe at the beginning of the summer, still under the umbrella of the COCLICO project, but probably organized more around PlanetForge.org.

I hope this will have a positive impact on the dynamics and collaboration between projects, and on the global forges ecosystem in the future. See you next time.

Meeting FusionForge à l’invitation de COCLICO, à Paris le 3 février

Le projet COCLICO invite les développeurs et utilisateurs de FusionForge à se retrouver à Issy les Moulineaux (France) le 3 février 2010 pour une journée destinée au travail technique sur ce logiciel.

Pour plus de détails veuillez vous référer à l’annonce en anglais : FusionForge developers/users meeting coming up, notamment pour les détails sur le contact des organisateurs.