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).

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

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.

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.

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).

Of course a first side effect was a more tightened community of actors who’ve evolved the still libre version of GForge into FusionForge.

Another recent event is the release of Codendi which is at last freely downloadable, and which is claimed by Xerox as a move in the direction of the COCLICO project.

Glad to see things moving in the right direction.

Although it was used by numerous projects at clients of Xerox (and internally), I’m not sure the strategy was clear for Xerox, mainly considering the cost of maintenance of these complex platforms. Xerox made a business of service around Codex, but wasn’t so sure about the licensing strategy, I think, and wether being an editor for Codex was something really interesting. There were some trolls around when the subject was mentioned, together with the interesting features in Codex that lacked in GForge, for instance, when would they contribute to the free world, etc.

They have apparently make up their minds and liberated the parts of the code that weren’t free, and also renamed the software which is now called Codendi (it had passed under my radar, but I got the news at the workshop of french forgerons).

This opens new opportunities for collaboration for Xerox and the users of Codex/Codendi, and may help achieve some convergence between GForge and Codendi, on parts which keep quite similar in both software which initially started out of the last free versions of SourceForge (through plugin infrastructure unification ?).

After the liberation of Scilab, yet another new libre software !

Let’s hope that this is a very good news for the future of the forges in general.

Congratulations Xerox !