Tag: HELIOS

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.

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).

First webcast of a demonstrator of our bug ontology’s use

We have setup, as part of our work in Helios, a very early demonstrator of a database of RDF facts about bugs in several distributions (currently Debian and Mandriva), in order to try and validate the Ontology describing bugs that we develop.

Here’s a pointer to the first webcast on fetchbugs4.me’s blog, with more details.

Very interesting presentations this morning at OWF about the future of the Semantic Desktop

I’ve attended this morning the OWF session on the future Semantic Desktops, with excellent presentations by Stefan Decker (DERI) on the concepts of the Semantic Web and the Social Semantic Desktop, by the Zeitgeist project guys (Seif Lofty and Alexander Gabriel), and finally by Sebastian Trüg demonstrating the Nepomuk semantic desktop components in KDE.

It was a good occasion to meet these people (together with Henry Story) and talk a little bit about our efforts in the area of bugtracking and Semantic Web, and to discuss the future of the Baetle ontology, and do more teasing for fetchbugs4.me.

I hope some day, we integrate the models and tools so that bugs filed on bugtrackers can be referenced and manipulated with Desktop tools through interoperable APIs and common ontologies. More work ahead of us in Helios 🙂