As can be see in the screencast below (also here) there are 2 types of compact preview popups :

• those for local resources of the forge, that are displayed directly, as queried by the JS code on the /users/ or /projects/ pages with a specific “application/x-fusionforge-compact+html“content-type (required in the Accept HTTP header).
• those compatible with the OSLC compact preview specifications, that can be displayed, should any other application want to display a compact preview. Again, these are served with content-negociation for “application/x-oslc-compact+xml“, which returns a short RDF document, which points to a script of the forge in charge of rendering the HTML compact preview.

The latter is demonstrated in the screencast, for display of popups for remote projects linked to a fusionforge project with the ‘extsubproj‘ plugin I already blogged about.

This code is still new, but will hopefully extend to other forge resources.

In the meantime, I’d be glad to see other forges implement similar mechanisms.

That OAuth consumer has been put to work in order to connect to twitter’s API, so that the forge is now able to push news to tweeter and other IM services.

OAuth will, beyond twitter, allow the forge to interoperate with other web services supporting connections on behalf of users, instead of using fake accounts, or storing passwords in the databases.

All these are committed in FusionForge’s SVN trunk.

Authors: Olivier BERGER, Sabri LABBENE, Madhumita DHAR, Christian BAC

Abstract: In the COCLICO project, efforts have been made to improve interoperability of software development forges, to help integrate them better in the modern software quality process of organizations. In order to improve such interoperability, implementation of the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) specifications has been conducted (in particular the Change Management domain specifications). The OSLC-compatible open source adapters we have developed for the Jenkins Continuous Integration server and the FusionForge bugtrackers, have been integrated in a Web mashup, allowing to demonstrate the interoperability potential of OSLC-CM in a continuous integration use case. Even though deployment of OSLC is still limited for open source tools in the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) field, we believe it will offer great benefits and potential, for new complex and difficult problems, in particular for large scale bug tracking applications.

Keywords: ALM, standard, interoperability, OSLC, OSLC-CM, FusionForge, Jenkins, open source, free software

The first plugin is called extsubproj, and allows the definition of links to external subprojects (i.e. hosted on another forge), in the properties of a FusionForge project. It’s basically managing a set of stored URLs and displaying them in the top project’s summary page. Nothing fancy, so far, and the code is not yet finished, nor pushed to FusionForge’s trunk yet.

The second plugin, called doaprdf, allows the publication, by the forge, on the same URL as the project summary page (those URLs are standardized in FusionForge in the form : http://.../projects/projname), of a RDF+XML description of some of the project’s metadata, using the DOAP dialect. This works with content-negotiation, following principles of the Linked Data paradigm, so that the same URL, when requested for HTML, renders a Web page (the forge project’s summary page) meant for humans^geeks, and when queried with a special content type Accept HTTP header (Accept: application/rdf+xml), meant for machines.

Now, when you combine these two, you gain the possibility of having extsubproj display not only the suprojects’ URLs, but also some of their meta-data, for instance a link in the form of <a href="http://.../projects/projname">fetched doap:name</a>.

The POC illustrates how one may then construct a hierarchy of (public so far) projects and sub-projects accross the buondaries for different forges databases, and display them in a similar manner as local projects (for instance, what the FusionForge plugin projects-hierarchy provides), through dynamic query of the remote project’s properties fetched on demand and modeled in a generic dialect (RDF with common ontologies such as DOAP).

Note that a similar FusionForge plugin “foafprofile" is being developped too for users profiles, using RDF and FOAF.

Stay tuned for more content in the same vein.

Titre de l’exposé : Bug tracking à grande échelle et interopérabilité des outils de développement dans l’écosystème FLOSS

Résumé :

L’écosystème du logiciel libre (FLOSS) est caractérisé par un développement extrèmement décentralisé, avec de multiples canaux de production et de distribution décorellés, et des processus d’assurance qualité qui doivent donc prendre en compte ces aspects.

Il reste encore de nombreux efforts d’implémentation à conduire, mais avec un espoir concret à lé clé de permettre la réalisation de nouveaux outils, basés sur l’approche Linked Data, permettant un suivi des rapports de bugs à grande échelle.

Toutes les informations concernant ce séminaire sont sur : http://www.irill.org/activities/seminaries

Update : les transparents de l’intervention sont en ligne (PDF 4 Mo).

The more the merrier

More details here: Program of the Cloud / Virtualisation / Interoperability conferences.

Update 2011/05/11 : slides (in french) uploaded. The screencast of Jenkins and FusionForge integration through OSLC-CM delegated creation dialog (AJAX mashup) also online.

See my french blog post for more details.

Venez nombreux

Plus de détails : Programme des conférences Cloud / Virtualisation / Interopérabilité

Update 11/05/2011 : transparents mis en ligne (PDF). Le screencast de la démo d’intégration de FusionForge et Jenkins via OSLC-CM est aussi en ligne.

Jenkins + FusionForge trackers integration with OSLC delegated creation dialog from Olivier Berger on Vimeo.

FusionForge‘s test suite uses PHPUnit to drive Selenium (RC) “end user” like tests. Selenium is a tool that makes such tests possible by piloting an instance of FireFox browsing the Web interface of the forge, in a controlled environment.

The OSLC test suite consists in a series of JUnit tests, which is driven by Maven (initially started from inside Eclipse, then also from command-line after I found the nasty command line parameters and changes in the pom.xml file that were required .

The whole of the test suite may not pass for our implementation of OSLC-CM in FusionForge, so some tests fail, but I don’t bother too much as this is “normal”, and all we’re caring for at the moment is mainly non-regression. There seemed to be no way to exclude some of the tests from the suite for the moment, but fortunately, that doesn’t matter, since the way I have integrated both test suites happens to allow the verification of only success on some of the tests.

So, the way they are integrated is through execution of the JUnit suite during one of the test cases of the Selenium suite (using a system( ) PHP call), which generates an HTML report (using the Maven SureFire reports plugin), which can then be viewed in the Web pages of the tested forge, so that Selenium + PHPUnit assertions can verify the content of the test report.

This is a bit hackish, but all in all suites our needs so far. Next step is to see if it works in other people’s test environments, including the automated executions in Hudson.

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).

The first forge to be presented by Sylvain Beucler was Savane, which is the software that runs the FSF’s forge Savannah (EDIT: I have uploaded a preview video of the talk). He spoke about the previous and future road-map of the Savane project. Breaking away from its legacy PHP code (sourcing from the old libre Sourceforge codebase in PHP), Savane is going in for a complete code rewrite. This is quite a bold decision and awaits a lot of work for everyone involved. However it also allows the choice for newer tools (Django), languages (Python), practices, and should provide a more modern, easy-to-wield forge at the end of the day. Main novelty should be in a new model of forge that would be decentralized (following recent trends ala git, and guidelines about freedom in the Cloud by Moglen and others), but I’ll blog on that topic later.

The second presentation was that of fusionforge, by Roland Mas (EDIT: I have uploaded a preview video of the talk). Like Savane, Fusionforge’s ancestry also started as a fork of the old Sourceforge. The path followed by them in recent times, interestingly however is quite different from Savane’s plans. Instead of building a new fusionforge, they are trying to make the current one better, providing more features and upgrades, through code clean-up and smooth refactoring. As Fusionforge has a good user-base (often as old heavily patched GForge 4.x deployments), the effort is also more to merge in the plugins/patches developed by its users and bring about more contributions (hence the fusion term). A considerable amount has aleady been done, with more on the way. It was also mentioned that as part of efforts conducted in the COCLICO project, there’s now some converging code (plugins, for instance) between Codendi and FusionForge to try and reduce implementation efforts (Codendi is another of the cousins of Savane and FusionForge forked-off from the Sourceforge base).
Beyond efforts on FusionForge, together with other COCLICO project participants, Roland and me initiated the PlanetForge initiative, that seeks for more discussion, interoperability and other experience exchange among forge implementers and users. It was discussed during the Q&A session, and we tried to clarify that the goal is not to make other forges merge to FusionForge (even if different forks of the same PHP codebase could benefit from merging together). The goal of PlanetForge is to create an interest community, so that each FLOSS forge project can continue to live its own life, but that, if possible, all can better share information, APIs specs and other interoperability means. In short, be different, while still interoperable to each-other.

The next presentation was about Launchpad, by Jonathan Lange (EDIT: I have uploaded a preview video of the talk). It was a general presentation, explaining how Lanchpad came to be developed, the current priorities, motivations of the people who are behind launchpad, its different features, and so on. There was some discussion afterwards on whether the goals of openness seeked by LaunchPad authors can be compatible with the technical difficulties in setting up LaunchPad instances for one’s own use.

The last presentation of the afternoon was on How to choose a forge for your needs by Joseph Roumier. A good talk outlining the why and how of the methodology used by his team at CETIC, to go about selecting a forge, for their specific needs. Any guesses for the winning forge ? You’ll have to watch the video, or read the slides.

Previous parts :

• (1/4) Report on programming languages and techniques in Development session of RMLL/LSM 2010 (1/4)
• (2/4)Report on ALM, QA and industrialization methods and tools presented in “development” track at RMLL 2010 (2/4)

Next parts:

• (4/4) Final part of the report on the Development track at RMLL/LSM 2010 (4/4)

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/