ervin’s piece of web

Sorry to all the males out there, but I won’t be posting pictures of Angelina Jolie… I’ll be talking software here.

So JOLIE is an interpreter for a high level language to interact with services. Services as in service oriented architecture, and yes that includes web services but also much more. And, as you might have noticed, we discussed with the guys working on JOLIE during the Tokamak Mark I and as Danny hinted, I wrote a Qt implementation of SODEP (the protocol used to interact with running instances of JOLIE).

Now you might wonder, what’s the point of all that? Well, it’ll enable KDE, to be a first class citizen in the service oriented world (and seeing the amount of web services out there or the growth of D-Bus usage, that’s an important goal). By “first class citizen”, here I mean making it trivial to interact with those services, today we can interact with them but that still require quite some hand made code, something JOLIE and the facilities we’re planning to add in Plasma will hopefully make obsolete.

That’s mostly post-4.1 material… Except that Fabrizio Montesi one of the humongous JOLIE developers couldn’t wait and wrote some proof of concept code. So I’ll post a few screenshots he made because they’re pretty cool in my opinion. So what he made is a small service named Echoes and driving an amarok instance, and GWT based application providing a gui client to this service. Then users can fight over your playlist.

We tested it, it’s pretty nice all instances are synchronized. Also, if something is changed directly in Amarok you notice it in Echoes GUI. Now, it becomes really cool because you can embed such service clients in your cellphone:

Or even as a Plasma Widget:

Of course, it’s still all a bit experimental and ad hoc at the moment. Our goal post-4.1 is to make this kind of service client GUIs trivial to write and better integrated in KDE. Services are widespread now, let’s make use of them!

In case you forgot, the deadline for Akademy 2008 CfP is in two days… yes, May 1st is coming quickly now! If you haven’t submitted your abstract yet please don’t wait for the last minute. Moreover, every year, after the CfP is over, I find people who should have submitted but didn’t because they think what they do is boring. It’s just plain wrong.

That’s why, I’d like to remind everyone: Yes, what you’re doing is interesting. No kidding.

Since people need incentives to submit their interesting abstracts, here is the deal: The first two talks to be accepted this year will get a drink from me. After that, each of the 2^n-th talks which get accepted (so no need to rush crappy proposals) will also get a drink from me (that is the 4th, 8th, 16th and 32th since we generally accept no more than 50 talks).

Submit now, you might get a free drink.

This week I’ve been participating to the FISL conference in Porto Alegre. I held a 3 hours long tutorial here to introduce students to Qt and KDE development frameworks. The feedbak I got was pretty good, the questions were interesting and I even managed to cover what I was planning during this session. It’s been really enjoyable.

Apart from that, I’ve been mostly hanging at the Trolltech/KDE booth, or the speaker’s room. Lot of interesting people here. I’ve been very impressed by the INDT people, they’re a very nice and smart bunch of people.

Today is my last day in Brazil, since it’s sunday I’m going to relax a bit with Andreas and Thiago. It’s been great being here. I’m really looking forward to being back home, that said spending 14 hours in plain will probably be a pain. That’s all for now, I’ll probably blog again about Akademy 2008 CFP when I get back home.

I’m back from Milano. The first Plasma sprint has been a pretty good event. My only regret is the low productivity on the first day since we spent quite some time hunting for food. But once we found the right balance, the productivity just got through the roof and we got an humongous amount of things done (as the current activity in the repository proves).

I’d like to thank everyone involved in this sprint, we really formed a great bunch, that’s nice to be able to get things done and make new friends at the same time. A special thanks for Richard Moore, without him I’m not sure we would have seen the end of the API review. Also I’m really looking forward to collaborating with the JOLIE developers, it’ll probably cover all our current Web Services needs.

Also congratulations to Alexis who led the effort to make WoC finally happen in Plasma, and to Sebas who did a humongous job in this area too. Yet another important piece of the Plasma project finally done.

And now preparing for departure again, I’m going to FISL 9.0 where I’ll give a tutorial about developing applications with Qt and KDE. I probably still have to rework a bit my slides to fit the target audience and the time slot. I still have to pack too…

Once again I didn’t blog in a while… In particular I didn’t blog about this year project students even if they got covered once in the commit digest. Now we’re two weeks away from the official end of those projects, so I thought it might be a good idea to show some of their accomplishment.

Kapman

This year we experimented with a project starting from scratch, and apparently we had some demand for a copy of an old famous game… hence why now we have Kapman! It’s kicking and alive, it’s in a pretty good shape already so maybe it’ll be able to enter kdegames in 4.1. Of course it’s all SVG based so you can freely resize it (artists wanted!).

Kscd

We also poked the good old Kscd… Our team made quite a lot of improvements in there. In particular it’s now fully themable using SVG (artists wanted!), and uses MusicBrainz to identify discs. Of course it also got the expected KDE4 refactoring: it got ported to Phonon and Solid.

Ksirk

Ksirk is one of those games we have in playground for quite some time. One of our team has been working on it to improve its quality and make it releasable… It’s definitely getting there. They mainly worked on improving its usability and that shows in my opinion. At least now I feel like I could play with it for hours.

Kopete

Last but not least, this year we got a team working on Kopete. They did an awesome job, it’s harder to demo or to make a screenshot for it, but they mainly focused on integrating support for UPnP and for the new live messenger protocol. On the UI front it looks less impressive, but I’m very proud of this team, they definitely had the hardest project to work on and learned a lot. Since I had no screenshot to offer, here is a picture of today’s “Kopete Gang of Four” who attended the hacking session:

From left to right: Maximilien Verdier, Michel Saliba, Romain Castan, Kevin Kin-Foo.

A few words on the hacking sessions…

Of course, after last year projects we kept the good habit of having KDE Hacking Sessions in Toulouse, we even have now a few people who are coming regularly… the community is definitely growing here. And during the student projects we have an unusual amount of my students showing up.

From left to right: Sylvere Lestang, Kevin Kin-Foo, Romain Castan, Michel Saliba, Maximilien Verdier, Stanislas Krzywda, Anne-Marie Mahfouf.

Missing on the picture: Thibault Normand who arrived later, and Alexis Menard who is unfortunately sick today.

Last week-end we had the release event in Toulouse, it has been the only french event and that’s why I decided not to go to Mountain View. On friday evening we had a long user oriented talk with some bits of Aaron’s keynote, followed by a cocktail and a merchandising booth. It’s been a real success, I expected not more than 20 or 30 people… but it turned out that the room was full, some people had to stay outside. Also I was the one giving the talk, and I think I didn’t screw up from the questions I had after the talk and people reactions. Of course, I played our first KDE Commercial, especially since it’s been secretly done by a couple of people in Toulouse. They really did a great job in my opinion.

On saturday, we had technical conferences for the whole day. We had a really nice bunch of speakers. Aurélien Gâteau, David Faure and Lauren Montel travelled in Toulouse just for this event and give talks. We also had our local gems: Anne-Marie Mahfouf and Alexis Ménard. I also gave a couple of talks. The atmosphere was quite nice, people had interesting questions and David even implemented a feature request almost in realtime (after screwing up his desktop).

We (the speakers) ended up the saturday evening in a restaurant, Aux Fils de l’Aligot, were we had an excellent regional food. Laurent and David didn’t knnow what aligot is so we had to help them discover it. Too bad Aurélien had to leave in the afternoon… next time Aurélien you’ll have your share of food too.

Finally, I’d like to thanks all the people who made this two days event possible:

• our sponsors, C&S and KDAB;
• all the speakers who made this event possible;
• all the people from Toulibre who were really supportive;
• Michel Saliba who spent hours coordinating the necessary work to subtitle Aaron’s keynote;
• and a special thanks to Alexis who really did a great job organizing this, he was so active I didn’t have much left to do.

It’s really nice to see how the Toulouse community pulled such an event almost from nothing… I think it was a good test run for us, maybe next time we can try something bigger. Akademy 2009 or 2010 anyone? :-p

Congratulations to all the people involved. Even if you just committed a couple of lines, made a bug report, showed support, etc. anything to push the project forward, you helped in making this release happen. You helped ensuring the future will be brighter. Be proud of you!

Be Free.

Last day of FOSS.in I had some network problems, and I’ve been
left with almost no access since then. Hence why I’m blogging this
only now and the entry will be slightly short.

The last two days were marked by a few talks I attended.
Particularly, Danese Cooper talk was brilliant, she’s one of the best
speakers I know. This talk was very interesting, and relevant to most
people employed to work on Free Software. How to keep your ethics. How
to make your employer move forward in the right direction. Are important
part of the equation now that we see more and more companies involved
in Free Software development.

Of course other outstanding talks were the ones by Till and Volker
about Akonadi. Very well done guys! It gave me a very good overview of
what Akonadi is, and how to develop with it. I already claimed in the past
that I would never ever work on the kdepim codebase… Honestly they
gave me the will to work on Akonadi based PIM stuff which is a small
miracle. Akonadi really looks like the way to go for PIM: shareable accross
desktops, lightweight yet powerful, a nice and clean API taking care of years
of experience from our PIMsters. Congrats to everybody involved.

Last but not least, the talk from Andrew Cowie about how to become
a contributor was quite nice too. The idea to do it along with Shreyas was
terrific, it gave a very entertaining talk. Too bad there was too much content
for the allocated slot and they had technical issue at the beginning of the talk.
They had to rush in the end, which is unfortunate for such an important topic.

Finally, we had the official closing of the conference, it started with a
talk by Rusty Russell. Basically he was asked to give a talk which would give
everybody the will to become a contributor. Then, he came up with the very nice
idea to explain is own story, and to invite other kernel hackers to do the same.
After that he invited Sheela on stage and she made her first patch to the kernel
in live. That patch was sent on the relevant lists, we learnt later that it
got applied and will be shipped in the next kernel… Yes, that was that easy!
In the end of his talk he invited almost all the attendance on the stage: contributors,
users, people knowing developers, etc.

Atul then got on stage to the closing talk, he invited a few people to talk about
other indian conferences and events around Free Software. There’s so much potential
here that it’s really nice to see some dynamics around this topic in India.

It was the opening day for the conference part of the event. Very nice introduction by Atul in my opinion. The keynote was nice too, getting some insights about Anjuta development, where it came from etc.

Then, I attended Holger’s talk about Open Embedded, interesting stuff too. It really shows the difficulties of having to deal with small devices and how it impacts the community.

After lunch (ah! great food again!), I hanged into the Hacking Room for most of the afternoon showing bits of KDE, discussing the design, trying to give information on how to get started with some of our frameworks. Nice and interesting people were here to discuss. Because of that I missed the QtWebKit talk by Simon, but it was worth it.

And finally, I had my last presentation, about the student projects we did last year in my University (and we have a sequel running this year), it had some exclusive data in it on how it’s going this year. I got really nice feedback to this talk, truely nice to see so many students and a few professors in the room. There’s definitely some will to replicate this and I’d love to help such efforts. We’ll see where it goes…

Since the first day of the conference was over, we moved to a restaurant… Followed by some of the organizers, we ended up being 20 people in there. Was a traditional “on the banana leaf” restaurant. Great people (again), awesome food (again)… I ended the day full and happy!

Daily report from FOSS.in (at least I try). It was the day were we had the KDE project day, so I was of course hanging in the KDE room all day. Unfortunately it was a quite remote room, which didn’t make it easy to find us, but we had our share of people, and at least we were sure they were motivated to find us.

Overall we had nice talks, and of course nice questions. I’m not that happy with my talks too, I think I somehow missed the target audience, but I learnt from this and will do better next time.

In the evening we had a nice party in a karaoke bar. The food was great, the people too. At the end of the party one of the organizer was drunk, she had to count us ten times to know how many taxis to get. In the end we had our taxi and went back to the hotel.

For those wondering: no, I won’t give the name of the drunk organizer for her own sake… I’ve been told it’d be disclosed by other bloggers anyway.