This is the third part of the report from the recent RMLL/LSM 2010 “Development” technical track (see links to previous parts at the bottom of this post)
This part deals with the forges afternoon that took place on the 7th, co-authored with my colleague Madhumita Dhar (who’s also working on the COCLICO project).
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A new paper of ours was just published. If you’re curious about all that Semantic Web and Linked Data hype and how it would impact forges and other software development tools, and the link with Open Source development platforms, then, read this :
Weaving a Semantic Web Across OSS Repositories: Unleashing a New Potential for Academia and Practice
(DOI:10.4018/jossp.2010040103)
Authors: Olivier Berger (Institut Telecom, France); Valentin Vlasceanu (Institut Telecom, France); Christian Bac (Institut Telecom, France); Quang Vu Dang (Institut Telecom, France); Stéphane Lauriere (Mandriva, France)
in International Journal of Open Source Software & Processes (IJOSSP) Volume: 2, Issue: 2 (2010), Pages: 29-40 pp.
Here’s the abstract:
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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).
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During the forecoming Libre Software Meeting 2010 (aka Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre) to be held from July 6th to 11th in Bordeaux (France), the “Development” technical track will host 27 interesting talks covering various aspects of software development with and/or for libre software. Among the topics covered, here’s the list of talk titles :
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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.
You work on developing a software forge, you’re an admin for a software forge, or a project administrator.
Join us and discuss (in english) forge matters on discussions@planetforge.org, to try and improve communication, sharing, reuse and interoperability among various hosting platforms, and collaborative development tools.
You may prefer joining the PlanetForge RSS aggregator if you blog about forges (feel free to add it to your preferred RSS reader).
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)
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.
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.
I’m glad the COCLICO project, even if not yet officially started, is already motivating interesting progress.
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.
Pour info, le projet COCLICO devrait commencer prochainement, et nous devrons recruter des CDD pour accompagner l’effort de développement sur le projet.
Tous les détails ne sont pas encore précisés, mais pour info, voici déjà un descriptif général de nos besoins.
Envie de travailler dans le logiciel libre : prenez le temps de jeter un coup d’oeil sur notre descriptif
Le projet COCLICO, au montage duquel nous avons participé, vient d’être retenu dans les résultats du 7ème appel à projets FUI (pôles de compétitivité).
Cela augure de travaux sur la convergence entre différentes forges de développement logiciel dans les prochains mois, le tout en logiciel libre bien entendu car labellisé sur le Groupe Thématique Logiciels Libres du pôle System@tic (ainsi que par le pôle Minalogic).
Plus de news bientôt.
Gforge 4.5 is the FLOSS version of GForge, that most of us can download, install, for instance as Debian packages.
But for some users looking for “the” latest, most up-to-date GForge, there’s a risk to go test (and buy) a non-free version of GForge AS, the “proprietary” version made by the main initial author of GForge, Tim Perdue (through his company GForge Group). While having a new product developed by a company which contributed to the liberation of GForge is not necessarily bad, the problem is that this confusion hinders the momentum for contributions to the free code base.
There seem to be some movement in the GForge community these days, towards more dynamics on the development of this leading FLOSS project, which hosts so many interesting libre projects.
Update 2009/01/25 :Expect some announcement in the forthcoming days on this front. Roland Mas has just announced what I was more or less announcing in this teaser : FusionForge has forked been announced.
Hi.
I’ll be chairing the “development” track at the forecoming (10th edition) LSM/RMLL which will happen in July in Nantes (France).
I expect contributions about FLOSS development, so will soon push a formal call for contributions/communications, but here’s already the description of the track contents : Call for Communication concerning the “Development” topic of the 10th Libre Software Meeting (Nantes, France, july 2009) .
If you feel interested in co-chairing, I’d be glad to know
Pour info, le 21 janvier prochain aura lieu la prochaine rencontre de la communauté des forgerons francophones, dans le même esprit que la rencontre précédente de juin dernier.
Pour info, le descriptif complet de la rencontre prévue à La Cantine :
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