Tag: interoperability

New paper “Introducing OSLC, an open standard for interoperability of open source development tools”

We’ll be presenting at ICSSEA 2011 in november, our paper “Introducing OSLC, an open standard for interoperability of open source development tools“, which recaps of some efforts we conducted in COCLICO.

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

Dynamically querying external (sub) projects properties with RDF in FusionForge

I’ve been working recently on two plugins for FusionForge. The work is somehow a POC for some COCLICO dynamic interoperability work-package, but some outcomes may actually be of use someday in real life, who knows 😉

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.

Intervention au prochain séminaire IRILL : Bug tracking à grande échelle et interopérabilité des outils de développement dans l’écosystème FLOSS

Je suis intervenu au séminaire Logiciel Libre et Programmation de l’IRILL, le jeudi 09/06 à 15h45.

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.

Dans cet ensemble de processus d’Assurance Qualité, nous détailerons le volet du suivi des rapports de bugs, en présentant quelques pistes de standardisation et des mécanismes d’interopérabilité (comme le standard OSLC).

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).

Quick report from OSLC meetup in Paris last week

Last week, as part of the COCLICO project‘s efforts to work on forges interoperability issues, we invited partners and contacts for a short meetup in Paris, with a special guest, Steve Speicher, lead of the OSLC-CM domain work-group.

Steve was in Paris to speak at the Open World Forum 2010 in the forges interoperability track. As time slots at OWF were quite short, we proposed to have this meetup a few days earlier to be able to have more detailed discussions and demos.

Steve has presented the following slides : OSLC Specifications for Interoperability and a screencast of AJAX interaction between an OSLC-CM server and a consumer.

On our side, we made a quick demo (a screencast actually) of our Mantis add-on for OSLC-CM.

We have discussed several technical aspects of OSLC, and also the community of actors working on the specifications. Regarding the french speaking community, there doesn’t seem to be an urgent need to have a specific structure setup so far, but we will nevertheless probably continue sharing content in french whenever we have some time.

I’ve been very glad to meet Steve, and hopefully, there are gonna be other times for new meetups. Why not a formal OSLC conference some day ?

In the meantime, feel free to tell us if you’d like to discuss OSLC and forges interoperability.

COCLICO project’s efforts towards better forges interoperability (long)

Abstract

I’ve given a talk in the recent Open Forges Think Tank track of Open World Forum, which was organized by Christian Rémy from Bull, also a partner in the COCLICO project (btw, thanks Christian, this was a great track, with several interesting presentations and a great panel).

I’ve had the privilege to speak on behalf of the whole COCLICO project, in the afternoon session which was focused on forges interoperability.

This article will somehow be a transcript of what I’ve said (or intended to say), with the accompanying slides available here.

In this quite long piece, I’ll first recap some of the context elements about the COCLICO project. Then I will describe the interoperability issues that I’ve tried and focused on in my presentation, including the issues of project lock-in in the forges. I’ve tried also to describe the current ideas we’ve elaborated in the project to address these issues of interoperability (including our plans for open standards elaboration for forges interoperability). I finally conclude with a proposal to join the PlanetForge community for all interested parties.

Unfortunately, not all of these ideas are currently yet properly documented on the COCLICO website, so I hope this article will serve as a useful reference for what COCLICO is doing, still being a subjective piece of my own views, not necessarily representing those of other COCLICO participants, nor a precise description of what we’ll manage to achieve in COCLICO or PlanetForge.

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