Archive for the 'Development' Category

Building W3C widgets on the Wookie training day

Published by Sander van der Waal on February 15, 2010 in Event, Development, Standards and Community. 0 Comments

Last week OSS Watch organised its first training day in Oxford. We got together with about 15 people to gain hands-on experience with Apache Wookie (Incubating). Wookie provides an implementation of the W3C widget specifications, so a lot of emphasise was put on building these kinds of widgets. We succeeded quite well in getting to know the spec and how to build widgets and ended the day with a nice collection of newly built widgets and even a submitted patch to the Wookie source code.

Scott Wilson, the Wookie guru from Bolton University, where it all started, started the day off with a presentation (pdf) of what widgets and Wookie are all about. Widgets are basically small mini applications that are designed to work in a small view area. Many platforms have created their own format for it, but the W3C is working on a set of specifications for it with a consortium of partners from both traditional computing and mobile platforms, which will lead to a true cross-platform standard which will hopefully lead to widespread adoption. A minimal W3C widget consists of nothing more than a config file and an HTML file, zipped up as an archive with file extension .wgt. The config file contains basic configuration such as the name, description and preferred dimensions of the widgets. The widget can furthermore include as much HTML, CSS, images and JavaScript files as one would like.

Apache Wookie (Incubating) is an application that provides a W3C-compliant widget server. You can use Wookie to deploy widgets and you can serve W3C widgets from the Wookie server in third party applications. Plugins have already been written for Moodle, LAMS, Sakai and Google Wave. Wookie also has a REST API that can be used to get, or create widgets.

After Scott’s intro it was time to get dirty. Ross handed out CDs containing the latest sourcecode of Wookie (which can be downloaded by anybody from Subversion) and prerequisites like a JDK and Apache Ant. His presentation (pdf) was about ‘how to build your first widget’. I was surprised to see that there were 10 people with Mac-books in the room, amongst 4 Windows machines and one Linux netbook. Apple surely knows how to impress the developer these days! After some initial troubles with environment settings etc. most people got up-and-running fairly quickly and were ready to build their first widget. Wookie provides handy Ant tasks for building and deploying widgets, which means that generating a hello-world skeleton widget is as easy as typing ant seed-widget and answering some questions about the name, description and dimensions of your widget. After you have started up the Wookie server using ant run you can deploy the widget using ant deploy-widget. That was it, quite easily. I must say, having moved away from Ant and using Maven2 for the last few years, it’s nice to be remembered of the powerful features Ant has to offer. Especially since Wookie uses Ant in combination with Apache Ivy, the dependency management alternative for Maven2. (To be precise, you can also use Ivy with Maven2 repositories). Ross also demonstrated how you can make use of OpenStreetMap JavaScript APIs to embed cool navigational features in your widget quite easily. You can check out his presentation (pdf) or directly check out the source code of the tutorial including the example JavaScript.

In his second presentation (pdf) Scott focussed on some design principles behind the widget specification and gave a walk-through of how you can design a more advanced widget by making use of features of the W3C widget object API and integrate with the Google Wave Gadgets API. No Wave server is needed to get this working, as Wookie can handle everything for you. Scott demonstrated a Task widget with collaboration features, that can be used by different users concurrently using State and Participants.

After the break it was high time for everybody to create their own widget and some interesting ideas had come up. One of us decided it would be much cooler to hack directly in the server code instead of building widgets and he submitted a patch to Wookie to allow hot deployment of a widget to ease the development/deployment cycle. That’s very cool, thanks Matthew!

The rest of us built some widgets for a wide variety of purposes. One of the nice things about the widgets was that we could easily merge them all together on one Wookie instance and show all widgets there. These were some of the widgets that resulted from this 1.5 hour hack-fest:

  • Video player embedded in a widget with fallback to other formats depending on the user agent
  • Display a list of links using output from one of the Yahoo pipes
  • Display the last.fm playlist of a user and show what that user is currently listening to
  • Show a canvas drawing where multiple people can collaborate by working on the same drawing using HTML5
  • Cool kids’ game where the user can name his pet dinosaur
  • Currency converter that (eventually) would use an external currency conversion provider

It was fun to see how easily you can create functional widgets. If you make use of external JavaScript APIs or data feeds it is also quite simple to create a useful (or not so useful…) widget. This was a nice conclusion of the day and seeing all the widgets we had created we thought we had deserved our beer and headed off to the pub. Thanks to Scott and Ross for making this a successful Wookie training day!

GNOME accessibility - the future

Published by stevelee on February 11, 2010 in Development, Software and Community. 1 Comment

The layoff of Willie Walker by Oracle is causing consternation in the the open source accessibility world, and for good reasons. As lead of GNOME accessibility and head developer of the Orca screen reader for the blind, Willie is a key member of GNOME accessibility. GNOME itself is a key player in the open accessibility field. The recent OSS Watch briefing note on open accessibility identified the importance of GNOME’s position and it’s contribution under the leadership of Willie.

Until this fallout from the recent takeover of Sun by Oracle, Willie was employed by Sun to work full-time on GNOME accessibility. The removal of Willie’s salary has removed a critical source of funding for open accessibility and the community is reeling as a result.

However despite the understandable concerns for the future of both Willie personally and GNOME accessibility, this is also a opportunity for both. People like Willie are highly sought after by employers who value leadership skills coupled with excellent technical experience. A couple of people described Willie as the Linus of open accessibility, a simile that has some merit. We can hope his next employer (or funder) will allow him to further develop his passion for accessibility, building on his impressive legacy to date.

For the GNOME and open accessibility communities, the impact of this seemingly crass business decision also causes us to focus hard. It can be a catalyst for improving the sustainability of this small but effective community as Willie himself indicates. I’d like to explore the subject a little in this post.

In general people get involved in open source for selfish reasons. These may be personal needs, corporate motivations or academic interests. The power of open development comes from working together to develop and maintain a common resource that benefits all players. The famous phrase is ’scratching an itch’. When it comes to open accessibility, however, there is an extra dimension. While many members of the community are users of accessibility, others are not and are involved for more complex reasons like social concern, if not quite altruism. This leads to members being in a position of “scratching another person’s itch”. There are elements of accessibility being a basic human right and these colour the community relationships and explain some of the strong outraged reactions to Willie’s layoff. As an aside it’s worth recalling Sun’s significant contribution to accessibility, something that was obviously not core business for them.

The fact that community members are in it for largely selfish reasons means they are likely to leave for equally selfish reasons. There should be no surprise at that. The key is to develop a broadly diverse community that can sustain any individual member’s exit. This is the opportunity I see we now have. I hope that Willie will continue to work full-time but I also hope we will work hard to attract more members who will also bring resource with them. Many of the reactions have vocalised the need to find funding but I feel we should focus on building the community first and the funding will follow. We also need to build community as, to be frank, there is a huge amount of work to be done, as can be seen on the GNOME 3.0 accessibility roadmap.

That might sound rather glib and the question is how can we move forward and encourage? Building community is difficult and not a science but there are many good examples to learn from. I’m fortunate to work for OSS Watch who’s key message is open innovation through community. Ross Gardler our service manager is also Vice President of Community Development at The Apache Software Foundation. The Foundation are also highly experienced in community development. Their informal moto is ‘Community over code’ and most of their activity is community building. For example the Apache Incubator helps projects develop their community and graduation requires at least 3 independent comitters to have joined. So there is a wealth of experience available to tap into and I’d like to see how the open accessibility community can use this to become more sustainable.

On to some practicalities. We are already seeing signs of the community dusting itself down and moving on. Eitan posted yesterday on further plans for the GNOME accessibility ‘hackfest’ at the CSUN accessibility conference. CSUN is THE accessibility conference and this year GNOME joins Mozilla in having a booth. This is the perfect opportunity to introduce GNOME’s work to the #CSUN10 visitors and encourage users and companies to engage. If you are going to CSUN be sure to find the booth and meet the team. The hackfest is the place for other developers to come along and learn what the code looks like and what needs doing. If your are a GNOME, KDE, Linux or Linux Mobile developer you should look us up to find out how to make your program accessible or how to work on accessibility programs.

This year the winners of Projects:Possibility’s SS12 open accessibility coding competition have been invited to attend CSUN. They will look around and present their winning projects. Accordingly computer science students from CSUN, UCLA and UCS will be able to learn about GNOME accessibility and find how they can engage in the action. At a minimum they will take their knowledge of GNOME to their future employers.

In a couple of weeks the GNOME Usability hackfest is in London and overlaps with the Dev8D developers days event. Cross fertilisation is planned and given that accessibility may be viewed to be a part of usability there is another opportunity to explore how to support GNOME accessibility.

OSS Watch have developed a tool that will be useful for exploring the sustainability options for GNOME accessibility. It’s part of our forthcoming Software Sustainability Maturity Model and provides a Q & A on the areas that need to be be covered in order to reach open sustainability. I encourage community members to try it on their project or the community as a whole. It will help focus on the the gaps and provide a common language for discussion of the solution. The form provides detailed explanations and the results are presented as percentages. If you are not sure just leave it as “don’t know”. Results are likely to be cleared at some point, so if you want to keep them drop us a line and we will provide a copy.

So in summary the news of Willie’s layoff is a source of considerable concern for him personally as well as the GNOME accessibility and the wider communities. It is also an opportunity to move on and develop new strengths through open development. The community has previously survived funding loss (IBM) and a key player leaving (Bill Haneman). As Willie says in his email - spread the word far and wide. The time is good as there is not only growing interest in open source in general but also a widening awareness of the benefits of open accessibility. If you are a member of the community then you can start thinking about how to reach out. If you are not yet a member then do introduce yourself at one of the events or on the lists or IRC.

The virtuous circle model of support for open source

Published by Ross Gardler on February 10, 2010 in Development, Strategy and Policy and Community. 1 Comment

On the OpenCast Matterhorn developer list the following question was recently posted by Rudiger Rolf:

we have a release of Matterhorn now, and people start to use our system and they need support. I’m sure that many of us are willing to help these adopters, but in which way should they communicate with us?

This prompted a discussion I have seen many times, and so I was prompted to post my response here.

In my opinion there are two main reasons why someone would support a user:

  1. they are selling services
  2. they want to improve the quality of the product

Financial transactions should be divorced from community activity and thus, from a community perspective, we are left with those wanting to improve the project (I’ll return to paid support later though). People providing support in the community have two main objectives:

  1. increase the number of users
  2. understand the problems users are facing in order to improve the product, to attract more users

Increasing the number of users will ultimately increase the number of contributors (bug reports, feature requests, documentation, user support etc.) and eventually developers (code improvements). Thus attracting users is a key part of creating a successful open source project.

However, not all users will become contributors, and not all contributors will become developers. In fact, the numbers of people progressing along this scale of contribution is very small. Nevertheless, just one contributor is a reduction in the centralised cost of development and thus a step towards sustainability for the project.

For some people the idea of free support for a growing number of users appears to lack scalability. They ask “if we are attracting users at a faster rate than contributors/developers how does the project continue to provide support? Surely there is  a danger of too many resources being devoted to support and not enough on development.”

These are common concerns in a growing project. However, these assumptions ignore the fact that some people are willing to pay for support. The ideal solution is to provide a user support mailing list along with supporting documentation. There is a need to encourage everyone to assist with these community support channels. This channel should become the place where the not only users get support, but also where those providing paid for support seek support themselves. However, support provided from the project community is provided on a voluntary basis and therefore no guarantees of service are provided. The message is clear, if you want guarantees of service then you need to pay for it.

Of course “paying for it” may not mean in cash. For example, if an organisation is known to provided paid for support but they also provide resources for project management, documentation, code or some other contribution they are earning “credits” to get support themselves.

Over time, the number of “first level user support requests”grows. However, the number of people able to answer these questions is also growing, lets not forget that some of those users are still around and are now indebted to the support community. Furthermore, since a healthy project encourages people to contribute early by documenting their experience in FAQs and getting started documentation there is an increasing amount of support documentation for newcomers.

This self-help culture enables core community members to focus on bug reports and feature requests rather than first level support requests.For those users who need a fast turnaround on support requests, they will have to pay. They may contract a third party or they may use local resources to set up a local support infrastructure.

If these paid support providers are smart they will reduce their own costs by interfacing with the wider support community via the project support lists. They will both consume and produce commons support materials in the project. They will also recognise that visibility in the community support channels is a form of marketing for their paid-for services. And this is where the virtuous circle finally closes.

The power of community put into practice

Published by Sander van der Waal on January 26, 2010 in Development and Community. 1 Comment

At OSS Watch, we actively promote that there is more to open source software than just a licence. Open source projects should use not just an OSI-approved licence but practice the open development method and if they want to become sustainable they should be building a community around their project. Once in a while, we come across a nice example of how the power of the community can be beneficial, and recently one of these examples occurred.

It started with an application that has been built by Nick Burch at the Apache Software Foundation to facilitate the search of geographically ‘nearby people’. He made this little Django application available via a Subversion repository with an Apache licence.

Linking people and projects is also one of the aims of the project registry framework Simal that OSS Watch is involved in. On Simal’s public demo site there is a collection of projects and people working on these projects. Besides doing development work on the Simal application OSS Watch is starting to use the registry more often in our daily work. Unfortunately, we recently failed to find out about a project that was run at our institution, Oxford University, even though it was present in our public registry.

When I realised Simal was lacking functionality that had been useful for OSS Watch, i.e. to find nearby projects based on location, I created issue 263 for Simal, dumping my thoughts about possible solutions, among which the ASF application on nearby people.

A key problem in adding this functionality was to have the geo-location data of the institutions that are in involved in the projects. This prompted Ross to reach out to his wider community to see whether anyone had tackled this issue.

The first and very useful suggestion on this matter was from Paul Stainthorp who pointed to a list of UK universities and their geo-location, which is maintained at Wolverhampton university.

The second one was from Sam Easterby-Smith who pointed to a list on Wikipedia. That was a good one, as Wikipedia is quite complete and geo-tagged, so we would have the data from that source if only we had a convenient way of extracting it.

The solution to that problem is to use DBpedia and it was suggested both by James, who added a comment to the issue in the tracker, and by Wilbert Kraan on Twitter. DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and it provides a public SPARQL endpoint for querying Wikipedia data. We can conveniently query that endpoint for a list of the geo locations of al UK universities and add that data to our Simal repository.

So within one working day we have a solution to the main problem, getting the geo-location data. But Ross’s discussion with someone already doing this revealed that they are manually creating the data, so they can potentially benefit from our search and automate it, if they want to. Furthermore, someone on Twitter noticed our search and he indicated that he would be interested in the solution, so potentially more people and/or projects can benefit. Furthermore, since everything happened completely in the open, even more people have the opportunity to find our solution and use it in their own problem space.

To me, this is a perfect illustration of the power of community. There is just so much that we all collectively know and by having your project run out in the open, freely accessible by everyone, enables you to tap into the collective knowledge of many experts. If this is not a reason to use the open development method, I don’t know what is.

Software Developers for Haiti

Published by Ross Gardler on January 22, 2010 in Development, Discussion, Software and Community. 1 Comment

Some time ago I posted “Does it take a disaster to understand the power of open development?” Unfortunately it is now time to revisit that post with a call for software developers to help Haiti.

The Sahana Software Foundation are looking for additional developers to help with Sahana, a disaster management tool. They need to continue to build an information portal that is seeing increased interest and usage to assist organisations responding to events in Haiti. Information on the work underway can be found on the Sahana Haiti response Overview page.

The skills they are primarily looking for are (you don’t need them all, any will do):

  •  Python - the main development for SahanaPy is Python (we’re not using PHP for this instance)
  •  web2py - Sahana uses the web2py enterprise framework for SahanaPy (I’m told it is fairly easy to learn if you’re used to Django)
  •  OpenLayers
  •  jQuery

To find out more and offer your help please jump onto #sahana on freenode. Please give as much or as little as you want.Some of the core devs have been working really long hours the past 5-6 days, and any additional resource would assist us greatly, particularly as the effort is really starting to get some interest, traction and coverage, which leads to more and more feature requests.

Thanks for reading this far - please consider giving a few hours of your time to help out, if you can.