Planet IM

Artur Hefczyc: MySQL database schema upgrade for Tigase 4.0

2008-09-05T11:50:59+00:00

For number of reasons the database schema had to be changed for Tigase server version 4.0. The most important are:

Compliance with the XMPP RFC which says that each part of JID may have up to 1023 characters. We store in the database user JIDs without resource name thus the maximum possible size of the user id is 2047. There aren't really JIDs that long yet but we experienced quite long JIDs in a few installations already so we decided to prepare Tigase to accept any JID allowed by RFC.
Performance and flexibility - the Tigase server now accesses database using stored procedures. This allows for any database storage format and it doesn't really matter for the Tigase server what is the database schema how data is organized inside. What it needs is just bunch of stored procedures to access the data. This allows for much more flexibility in storing user data as well as much easier integration with third-party systems and also organize data in more efficient way.

Therefore when you run the Tigase server now it may (depending on what exact SVN revision you use) refuse to start if it detects that the database schema is not updated. If it happens just follow steps below to update the database schema and start the server again.

Updating of the database schema is very easy and almost fully automated process. Just follow the steps below and you should be able to run new version of the Tigase server in a few minutes or even seconds depending on your database size. It takes around 7 minutes to update database with 200k user accounts on an average machine.

Artur Hefczyc: Tigase Minichat 0.11.0-beta

2008-09-04T13:35:08+00:00

A new version of the Minichat client has just been released. This is a new version and actually the first version publicly announced.

It is still considered beta but seems quite stable and the code works well under all major browsers.

The new stuff in this release are improved stability, remembering chat session between page reloads and support for a nick name for anonymous user.

If you want to see the Minichat in action please try the version installed on the Tigase.org website.

Christopher Zorn: Twisted XMPP

2008-09-04T12:02:52+00:00

It seems talk of an XMPP Server in twisted is picking up. I am looking forward to helping out! http://ralphm.jaiku.com/presence/43726932 http://twistedmatrix.com/pipermail/twisted-python/2008-September/018330.html

Jabber Filaments Blog: JabberWerx AJAX & .NET XMPP Client Libraries

2008-09-03T21:35:58+00:00

Adding presence and messaging to applications and Internet services just got easier with the release of the JabberWerx™ AJAX and .NET Libraries. Developers can use these libraries to accelerate the process of including real-time chat and presence to new or existing applications. The JabberWerx Libraries include support for presence, one-to-one, group chat, and other features appropriate for development with the .NET and AJAX frameworks. See the press release and product pages for more details.

Here are some examples of creating application components with the JabberWerx AJAX Library:

Web-Based Customer Support Application

Visitors to your site can chat with people inside your organization or community, and see their presence. This application can handle multiple chats via its tabbed interface. Background tabs light up when an unread message arrives.

Multi-User Chat Component

Any page can have a chat room that connects all of the visitors together into a community. Chat rooms provide great stickiness to your site.

The Interactive Web

Identi.ca is a great new open-source, federated micro-blogging service along the lines of Twitter. It supports XMPP for both sending and receiving posts, or “dents” in the Identi.ca slang. With that XMPP support, we were able to quickly prototype a client on top of JabberWerx AJAX that receives your friends’ dents as soon as they are posted. Note that all of the user interface is completely custom in this example; JabberWerx AJAX is just making it easy for your web applications to send and receive information.

JabberWerx AJAX Common Features

BOSH: use your existing Jabber XCP server
Persistence: as you move from page to page in a site, you do not have to reconnect to the server, and all of your state is maintained.
Browser support: Firefox 2/3, IE 6/7, Safari

From its inception, this blog has discussed the benefits of embedding presence into applications, devices and systems. Jabber XCP is Jabber Inc.’s highly extensible and massively scalable software platform that provides the server-side presence and messaging engine to enable next-generation applications. Now, the JabberWerx libraries simplify building the client components of presence-enabled applications, with full commercial support.

Stefan Strigler: JWChat’s homepage moved

2008-09-03T14:25:20+00:00

Another short note: Just finished moving all the content previously hosted at http://jwchat.sourceforge.net to this blog as http://blog.jwchat.org/jwchat/. Hope this will make it easier for me to maintain content and keep you up2date.

Ross Burton: Why I Hate September

2008-09-03T09:00:00+00:00

I hate September because it is in September that I finally get my mobile phone bill from GUADEC.

Total of 5 Calls while abroad 00:23:20 £31.402

Money grabbing tight fisted evil bastards. This includes a rate of £1.25 a minute to receive a call.

NP: Los Angeles, Flying Lotus

Process One: EQO study: Global Instant Messaging Market Share

2008-09-02T10:20:50+00:00

The mobile instant messaging developer EQO gathered data on the number of connections per instant messaging network through their client. The result has been summarized in a global map of instant messaging networks usage in the world.

The figures are not complete and they only compare relative usages of people using the EQO mobile client. However, it gives a good relative comparison of the instant messaging networks use.

Please, note that Jabber and Gtalk can actually be counted as a single XMPP instant messaging network. In Switzerland and South Africa for example, the XMPP network is close to be the leading instant messaging network.

The full article is available on EQO blog: Global Instant Messaging Market Share - July 2008.

Matt Rogers: reporting of windows bugs fixed

2008-09-02T01:40:09+00:00

If you were having issues filing bugs for windows related things on bugs.kde.org then you will be glad to know that I just fixed those problems.

Felipe Contreras: FelipeC

2008-09-01T23:02:06+00:00

Ever gone looking for instant messaging market share data?

It seems almost unfathomable that there can be networks with active accounts numbering in the 100 MMs to billions and total accounts certainly in the billions for which there is no detailed public market share data.

Hell yeah!

I personally know only about Mexico, and the data shows the situation I’ve witnessed. Also, msn-pecan users have told me similar things about many of the countries listed there; in some countries there’s only MSN (unfortunately).

Check the whole study here.

Daniel Henninger: Trying Eclipse

2008-08-30T18:19:47+00:00

When I first started trying out Java coding, I found it rather annoying. I was using vi and command line builds. I find that java takes a long time to compile compared to C and such, and hence it was a tedious and time consuming endeavour. Later, Matt Tucker introduced me to IntelliJ's IDEA (lots of people refer to it as IDEA, I refer to it as IntelliJ). At first I found it a beast and was resistent to it (being that my only IDE experience had been Visual Studio), but soon I began to adore it. I love the autocompletion, I like the automatic catching of compile bugs and such before even going to compile, and overall it made Java fun for me. In fact it make me actually wish I had a good IDE for Python at the time (I was working on PyAIMt and PyICQt at the time).

I'd heard of Eclipse, but I had not really used it before. I tried it once and couldn't figure out how to open a project and in general nothing about it made sense to me. I decided "why waste my time on this". Then came Flex Builder. As you may or may not now, Eclipse based. It's kind of like Eclipse with a lot of the cooler options in Eclipse stripped out. Generally I feel like it keeps getting in my way. Lots of keystrokes don't do what I want them to, in fact I can't -find- keystrokes to do what I want in a lot of cases. It seemed like autocompletion was a little "off". It wasn't as awesome as IntelliJs. It didn't always seem to work at all. Often I'd hit ., wait for a completion to come up, nothing, delete, try again, repeat until it really worked. Now, with so many people enjoying Eclipse, I began to wonder why. First off, IntelliJ ain't free, but it is for open source projects. It's also waaaaay bigger in terms of resource usage. So that might be one reason, IntelliJ is not easily accessible to everyone. But I figured, maybe Flex Builder is giving me a warped perception of it. I'd gotten some friends from work to walk me through some simple things like "opening an existing project" and such, so I know what to do at this point. =)

So at this point, I figured I want to give Eclipse a real try. I know it's less resource intensive. I decided I'd like to write down what I "require" my IDE to do at this point for me to like it and after I play with it some, see if it measures up to my pickiness:

autocompletion of methods on classes, with it displaying args for the methods in the drop down box
hungry backspace (if I hit delete I like it to wipe all of the whitespace in my way and get me back to something that's real content)
instant evaluation of errors without having to compile first, ideally including warnings for things that "could be better" and "you realize you didn't set this variable to anything, right?"
subversion integration, display of updated files compared to latest SVN checkout, easy commit of SVN files from IDE including picking and choosing what gets committed

Is that asking too much? Maybe. LOL I'm spoiled by IntelliJ. But I'm optimistic to give Eclipse a try and see how it feels, and if there are plugins to get what I want out of it. Would I switch to it as my primary IDE? Well who knows actually. This isn't necessarily an experiment to switch, but an experiment to see if I can learn to appreciate. =)

Mark Doliner: The Candidates

2008-08-30T08:23:36+00:00

I'm so happy with the Republican and Democratic candidates in this year's USA presidential race. I feel like Barack Obama and John McCain are SO much better than George Bush and John Kerry four years ago. I seem to remember many people my age voting for "not Bush." I definitely like Obama better--I might even go so far as to describe him as "sweet"--but McCain is cool, too. I especially like McCain's stance against the inhumane treatment of POWs (which is understandable considering McCain was a POW himself). And how incredible would it be to have a black president, when segregation was acceptable only 50 years ago?

Hopefully this indicates real progress and not just the political parties trying to appeal to the desires of a population suffering poor economic conditions.

Artur Hefczyc: Tigase packages dependency change - server compilation version 4.x

2008-08-29T18:22:48+00:00

The dependency for Tigase Utils Package has changed. This is important for everybody who builds the Tigase server manually from sources using Ant tool. The Maven handles all the dependencies automatically and scripts have been updated.

Please keep reading for more details how to compile the server from sources in current SVN repositories.

Process One: ejabberd 2.0.2

2008-08-29T16:50:18+00:00

ejabberd 2.0.2 is now ready for download.

This version is a maintenance release containing 49 bugfixes and improvements. You can read the Release notes for more details.

The new code can be downloaded from ejabberd download page.

This release follows the ejabberd 2.0.1 beta release launched in july 2008. Thank you all for your feedback !

Artur Hefczyc: Tigase XMPP Testing Zone

2008-08-29T09:04:41+00:00

We have just launched the Tigase XMPP testing zone. This is the Tigase server clustered installation with 2 nodes. The installation is integrated with the Drupal CMS.

At the moment it offers c2s, s2s and Bosh protocols. We are going to enable more services for testing soon: MUC, PubSub, MSN transport and possibly more.

Please feel free to create an account on the Drupal website and use it for testing of your software.

Note. The installation is available through rather average broadband connection and it is not suitable for any kind of load or high traffic tests.

As usually all comments and suggestions are very welcomed. If you have ideas to improve the installation and make it easier for your tests please let me know.

Felipe Contreras: FelipeC

2008-08-28T23:36:04+00:00

This release has many changes.

The most important is offline messaging support (read-only), but there are many, many bug-fixes thanks to the Adium guys that helped to track them down.

The diffstat is quite big:
70 files changed, 7603 insertions(+), 1023 deletions(-)

So there might be regressions, but the target is to fix most of nasty issues on 0.0.15. There will be a redesign on the code that handles the switchboards and notification servers, which basically means everything. Hopefully this will make it easier to track the bugs and squash them.

Also, one of the objectives is to have support for Empathy, which is going to be the official IM client for GNOME.

The rest of the issues would have to wait for 0.0.16.

Oh, there’s also translations and packagin for Debian, Gentoo, FreeBSD and a win32 installer

Special thanks to the Adium team, Evan Schoenberg, Devid Antonio Filoni, Eion Robb, Bernard Cafarelli, Henrik Friedrichsen, Marco de Moulin, Simo Mattila, Alexandre André, Jovan Turanjanin, Edgardo Fredz, and Erik Fredriksen. Sorry if I missed someone.

Download from the usual place at googe code.

Cheers.

Remko Tronçon: Trying out Git

2008-08-28T06:56:27+00:00

A while ago, the Psi development team switched from Darcs to Subversion for version control, because the Darcs pros (distributed, extremely simple and elegant) did not compensate for the cons any longer (slowness, non-scalability, ‘infinite’ merges, lack of community and tools, …). Our development was pretty central anyway at that time, so we decided that Subversion was good enough. However, we started to miss local commits more than we thought we would, and some of us are working on their own forks, which makes Subversion a suboptimal choice. We are therefore currently trying out Git as a replacement, which should bring us all the good stuff from Darcs, combined with the speed and portability of Subversion. Note that during the experiment, we will not be updating our Subversion branch any more (which will soon cause breakage, since Subversion automatically updates changes to the external Iris repository).

If you’re interested in following our latest developments from our experimental Git tree, simply clone our official repository through the following steps:

git clone git://git.psi-im.org/psi.git
cd psi
git submodule init
git submodule update

To get the latest changes after an initial clone, execute the following commands

git pull
git submodule update

Note that you need Git 1.5 or later in order to be able to do these commands.

If you’re interested in knowing more about using Git, check out Scott Chacon’s excellent Git talk (and accompanying book).

For fans of social networking, we also have a mirror of the official Psi repository on GitHub. And while we’re on the topic of web interfaces: while waiting for an official web interface to our Git repository, you can check out an experimental one here.

Process One: Instant Messaging as a social research tool: Study revives six degrees theory

2008-08-25T07:49:26+00:00

According to a recent study by Microsoft into instant messaging habits it takes only six steps to link everyone together.

The research carried out by Microsoft researchers Eric Horvitz and Jure Leskovec studied 30 billion instant messages sent using Microsoft Messenger during June 2006 and found that any two people were linked by seven or fewer acquaintances.

As reported by BBC News, Horvitz says "What we are seeing suggests that there may be a social connectivity constant for humanity."

This research is further evidence of the social and collaborative benefits instant messaging can offer both in and outside of the enterprise through linking more and more people together.

You can get more details on the article from BBC News: Study revives six degrees theory.

John Bailey: It's a bit late...

2008-08-24T14:06:33+00:00

It's a bit late for me to be posting this now, but we did recently release Pidgin 2.5.0. There are a few things about this release that I'd like to discuss:

MSNP15 support
Custom smiley support
The Windows and *BSD AIM tooltip crash

Let's hit these in the order I listed them.

MSNP15. Finally, we have a release which includes updated MSN protocol support. We now support the personal message, current media, and offline message features of recent MSN official clients. We do not, however, support fast file transfers. We still support only the MSN-server-proxied transfer method, which while slow is 100% reliable. Quite frankly, file transfer isn't a high priority. If someone wants to implement fast file transfers, feel free to submit patches to us.

Custom smileys. During the development cycle of 2.5.0, a patch was accepted that implemented custom smiley support on MSN and provided a framework within libpurple for other protocols supporting the feature to grow support. There is one issue with this support--we can't save an incoming animated GIF emoticon. This is a limitation in gdkpixbuf, which doesn't support saving the GIF format by default. There are perhaps some additional dependencies we could incur for this, but nothing has been done in this area yet. To set up your custom smileys, go to the "Tools" menu on the Buddy List window and select "Smiley."

AIM Tooltip Crash. We've had a number of duplicated reports of crashes when "mousing over" an AIM buddy. The crash happens when trying to display the tooltip, and only appears when Glib uses its internal vsnprintf() implementation (which happens on some non-glibc systems, such as Windows and the BSD flavors of UNIX). An updated liboscar.dll that fixes this problem is available on ticket #6627. Please don't open any more tickets about this bug!

There is one other AIM bug I'd like to mention, since we're aware it exists. Not too long ago it came to our attention that when a Pidgin user joins an AIM chatroom and tries to send messages, less than 25% of the messages actually make it to the other members of the room. We are aware of the bug, but I believe we're not yet fully certain of the cause. A bug report already exists (#6590), so please don't open any more tickets about this bug either!

Hopefully all you MSN users out there enjoy the new features. It's taken a long time to get the features out there, but I think in the end the wait is worth it.

Felipe Contreras: FelipeC

2008-08-24T08:54:01+00:00

After developing a mtn to git conversion tool I understood much better how monotone works and why it does the seemingly crazy things it does. Once you understand the internals everything makes much more sense.

With the hope of shedding some light to the core developers of Pidgin regarding the DSCM tool (monotone) they use, I wrote an email explaining all the little details of monotone and how other tools do exactly the same thing in a simpler way. Here is the mail.

The results where mixed, some people discussed valid points, while others didn’t really try to understand and just attacked git, and myself. It seems some devs are quite fond of mtn and wouldn’t allow any attacks on it.

Anyway, at some point it was accepted that they didn’t do a good job at evaluating git, they discarded it because of the size of the repository (700M). Of course, they didn’t bother to read the manual, ask on IRC or in the mailing list. Don’t ask me why.

Apparently that discussion generated a post in John Bailey’s blog in which he explained why git is not a good option to him. That in turn generated a discussion in the git’s mailing list explaining that he was wrong, was doing an unfair comparison, obviously pushing his own agenda.

Then out of nowhere another discussion in the ohloh forums started. Basically an exchange between Gary Kramlich and me, in which I found out his blog post about a diagram explaining his typical workflow with monotone.

So I answered with this diagram, which clearly shows that exactly the same workflow is much simpler in git. I think in the end he realized that too.

So I’ve answered all their questions, and I’ve proved them wrong in their arguments, I’ve offered a hands-on session to clarify any misconceptions they might have. As a result I get John Bailey to call me a zealot that is not worth listening to.

Anyway, returning to the topic, here are some tips:

Don’t use an obscure DSCM

Even a popular SCM is better; your developers can use their decent DSCM (git-svn) to interact with it. If you choose an obscure DSCM you’ll have issues because of the lack of support, trac, web ui, desktop ui, free service provider (github.com), etc.

Also you make it more difficult for new contributors; they have to learn a new DSCM just to contribute.

Pidgin is the last major project that uses mtn, OpenEmbedded was using it but they decided to switch to git.

Don’t choose a DSCM that imposes itself

It doesn’t matter which DSCM you choose, not everyone is going to be happy with it, that’s why it’s a good idea to choose one that makes contributions as patches a part of the tool. Both bzr and git provide this functionality, people can send patches, for which they can use their favorite tool (git over bzr), and the maintainers can integrate the patches quite easily.

Not only that, but in order to allow reviewing the patches quite often need to be changed, that’s when rebasing comes. Both bzr and git allow rebasing, which is essential if you want to create nice patches, a la quilt style.

Moreover, bot bzr and git allow shallow clones so you don’t have to download the whole repo just to contribute.

Pidgin has a relatively big repository, so you have to download a tarball about 200MB, then do a couple of commands just to have the latest code. That’s because the initial fetch sucks in mtn.

Keep an open mind, but a closed mouth

DSCM flame wars can become pretty nasty pretty quickly, that’s why it’s a good idea to don’t participate in them. However, it’s good to be well informed about all the different DSCMs. There are other ways to be informed (private mails, or messages) discuss in the respective IRC channel of the tool you are interested in (#git, #bzr). That way you get the best facts pretty quickly instead of useless discussions.

~~Pidgin devs~~ Some Pidgin devs on the other had, praise their good understanding of other DSCMs, and are quick to point out why others are not a good choice for them, all based on misconceptions. After lengthy flamewars and embarrassing blog posts their stand is still: git is not good for us. All the reasons they’ve provided have been flawed, so now they hang on to the reasons they are not disclosing.

Well that’s it, if you are a Pidgin developer, or monotone user, that wants to get to know git better just let me know, send me a message or an email.

Cheers.

Gary Kramlich: Dear Anonymous

2008-08-21T18:46:21+00:00

So I imported my development blog into planet.pidgin.im. Something I've been meaning to do for awhile, but just kept forgetting to do. This blog has been syndicated on planet-im.com for years now, way back when Christian first started it.

Anyways, planet decided it was going to import three of my posts. No big deal right...

Tell that to the "spam victims", one of the posts, sure wasn't really development related, I can somewhat understand that. The other was me annoucing the release of a new project, *I*, a *pidgin developer*, had written. Both of which we're met by "stop spamming planet pidgin". Which I found completely ironic since these posts and more have, as I mentioned earlier, been syndicated on planet-im.com for quite awhile now.

Still, I find it exceedling hilarous what people consider "spam" these days. Apparently a developer's blog, where he blogs about things he's developing and sometimes non-development things to try and get and see responses from a wider audience, isn't filtered down enough. The whole thing reminds me a lot about the on going complaints of pidgin launchpad on our support mailing list as being spam amoung others.

The point I'm trying to get at here, is that when you sign up for a mailing list or read an aggrated feed, that unless you're an admin, you can *NOT* control what gets posted. Ironically, when you complain verbally about supposed spam, all you do is create more "spam".

This spam, that the verbal crowd then creates, of course fills things like our support mailing list with junk that really isn't support related, and thus offtopic making it harder for those looking for a solution in the archives, and last but not least makes us, the developers/admin look insensitive, when if the verbal people just ignored the "spam" in the first place we'd all be better off.

Kevin Smith: XMPP: The almost-definitive-guide to-be

2008-08-21T18:27:26+00:00

You’ll already have read, or be about to read, similar blog posts from Remko and Peter, I imagine, here’s my take:

Remko Tronçon, Peter Saint-Andre and I are writing a book on XMPP for O’Reilly, with a working title of “XMPP: The Definitive Guide”, expected to hit the shelves (and hopefully fly off them soon after) early 2009.

If you’re wondering how things like this come about, the story goes something like this:

Every so often, someone comes into the Jabber Development room, and asks if there’s any getting started documentation, or they ask if there’s a decent book, or they ask if there’s a guide to what Jabber/XMPP can do for them as a developer. For some reason, it seems to usually be me that ends up letting them know that there isn’t really, unless you want to go and read the RFCs, or the XEPs. I got the daft idea that writing such a book would be helpful, so I poked Remko and asked if he was interested in co-authoring something if O’Reilly would publish it - he was, so off we went and did very little for quite a while. As it happens, O’Reilly were interested in publishing a book about XMPP; realising an XMPP book wasn’t an XMPP book without Peter, we set about persuading him that joining us in the venture was a Smart Thing™, and things started moving.

We met up for a pizza at FOSDEM in February, hashed out where we wanted to go with the book, wrote out the overview, sent it off to O’Reilly, who didn’t hate it, and started writing.

Since then, we’ve made some decent progress on it, and also found out that writing books is hard work (even given that each of us has written at least either a doctoral thesis or RFCs). Still, we’re chugging along and things should be really taking shape in the next month or two
The rest will, someday, be history — we’ll post an update later when we’re closer to the inevitable fame and fortune.

Remko Tronçon: We’re writing an XMPP book

2008-08-21T18:23:47+00:00

I’m excited to announce that Peter, Kevin, and I recently got the green light from O’Reilly to start writing a book about Jabber/XMPP. The book will be targeted at a diverse public: on one hand, people who want to get acquainted with XMPP and will get an introduction and a general overview of XMPP, its workings, and its possibilities. On the other hand, software engineers who want to integrate XMPP into their products will get a guide to implementing different use cases of XMPP through a series of different developer stories. The book is expected to be available in 2009, so start making some room on your bookshelf!

Gary Kramlich: mtn usage...

2008-08-21T12:48:47+00:00

It's been brought up by certain people, that they "know" how pidgin developers use monotone, and that monotone is an inferrior tool. Thus I decided to take the time to document how *I* use monotone. Keep in mind, I use monotone for everything nowadays. The only time I use a different (D)VCS is when I'm working on a project that I didn't start.

At any rate, I'd be extremely curious to see the usage/flow of the same actions (working on an existing branch, branching a branch, starting a new project/branch, working on a new (to you) project/branch, merging branches, and serving a new project/branch) in other (D)VCS's as well.

Below is the fruit for said labor (click it for the full sized version, it's about 400KB though...). The digrams were created with dot from the graphviz package. The source of the diagrams can be found over here.

Matt Rogers: new bugzilla

2008-08-19T04:17:46+00:00

Ok, so Dirk surprised us all and upgraded Bugzilla to the new 3.0.5 version. There have been some growing pains associated due to the conversion. There’s more info on dirk’s blog about the reasons behind the quick conversion. All in all though, can’t say that it went too bad.

We’ll be continuing to improve things as the next couple of weeks go by, and you can always file requests on bugs.kde.org.

Over the next few days, I’ll be blogging about some of the additional features that the 3.0.5 version of bugzilla has over the ancient 2.16.1 version we were using, so stay tuned.

Ross Burton: Sound Juicer "I Don't Know What You Heard But It's Mandatory" 2.23.2

2008-08-18T13:59:53+00:00

Sound Juicer "I Don't Know What You Heard But It's Mandatory" 2.23.2 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Lots of fixes from the Amazing Matthew Martin:

Stop playback when the disc is re-read (Matthew Martin)
Only eject the disc if tracks were ripped (MM)
Don't try and move the non-existant temp file when skipping (MM)
Free the option context (Pierre Benz)
Don't block until n-c-b quits when copying discs
Fix playback track switching (MM)

Christian Hammond: Review Board Roadmap and Donations

2008-08-17T23:35:57+00:00

Roadmap

With the upcoming release of Django 1.0 in the next few weeks, we decided it was time to formalize a roadmap for Review Board 1.0. The roadmap provides a good overview of what users can expect for our release, and what it will take to get there.

At this point we’re asking for people to contribute wherever possible. The big thing is fixing bugs targeted for the 1.0 release. We’d also like some help in finalizing unit tests.

Quality Control

We’re doing what we can to improve quality control in Review Board. For a lot of people, Review Board works great, though setups often differ and some users hit issues that others never see. For this, we’re trying to improve our unit tests to catch these various cases. When people submit patches, we’d greatly appreciate unit tests to cover the new code, and in some cases will require them for the code submission.

Selenium

We will soon start using Selenium in our unit test process to simulate user action in various web browsers. Selenium allows for remote-controlling a web browser, simulating clicks, text input, and other user actions and checking the results. Over time, when our Selenium test suite is more complete, we should be able to catch browser-specific problems a lot more easily.

Buildbot Server

Another issue users have hit lately is breakages due to changes in Django for the 1.0 release. As things calm down there, this will become less of an issue, but we’ve put things in place to catch these problems before users do.

We have just set up a buildbot server that will perform a full build and run the test suite whenever there’s a code check-in to Review Board, Django, Djblets or Django-Evolution. It will then notify us when there’s a new breakage. Users can check the build page before updating just to make sure they won’t hit a major problem. Later on, our buildbot server will generate nightly builds and handle Selenium tests.

We have a limited number of servers to test with. If you have server space and resources to donate and would like to run a BuildBot Slave server, let me know. We’re looking to set up slaves to test various combinations of the following:

Python 2.5
Python 2.4
Django SVN trunk
Django 1.0
Windows 2000, XP and Vista
Internet Explorer 6 and 7 (for Selenium tests)
Opera (for Selenium tests)
Firefox 2 and 3 (for Selenium tests)

Sandbox

Our BuildBot server is also set up to allow us to test code changes before we submit the code. Running a sandbox build of our pending code will cause all build slaves to run the entire test suite. This ensures that we don’t break things accidentally.

If you’re a contributor working on large patches for Review Board and would like to have access to the sandbox, please post to the mailing list and we can work with you on getting an account set up.

Installation Improvements

We’re working to make the installation experience much easier. I’m in the process of creating Python easy_install packages for Review Board and Djblets. Soon, users will be able to simply easy_install ReviewBoard to get going instead of checking out the development tree. I’m hoping to create both nightly builds and release builds.

Code will soon go in to move the entire project configuration into the administration interface. Modifying settings_local.py and restarting the server will be a thing of the past. All that will be left there will be a few site-specific settings and the database settings. Expect this to go in real soon.

A tool is in development for helping to generate the initial Review Board server tree based on an installed reviewboard Python module (using easy_install) and generating the web server configuration files. This will hopefully take care of a lot of problems people hit when trying to get their server configuration right the first time.

And last but not least, before 1.0 we will have a first-time installation page that handles the creation of the initial settings_local.py and the adding and checking of repositories.

So in the end, the installation process will be something along the lines of:

sudo easy_install ReviewBoard
sudo rb-install-site /var/www/reviews.mycompany.com
Fill out the fields presented.
Hand-tweak the configuration files if needed.
Go to the page for the new Review Board server, fill out the fields and finish the install.

This is the goal, anyway. We’re going to try to get as close to this as possible for 1.0.

Donations

Review Board has become a full-time project for us. Though it got its start at VMware, it’s really a personal project developed in our spare time, not a project run by VMware. As the project grows, we’ve been putting more time, energy and money into it.

Hosting fees have started to become large, given that we’re now hosting the main project website, the main Review Board server for our code reviews, the demo server, the Google Summer of Code review server and the BuildBot server and slaves. Down the road, we have many plans that will also require funding.

To help cover our costs, we’re now made it easy to donate to the project. If Review Board has helped you, your company, team, or project and saved you money or time over alternative solutions, maybe you’d like to help give back to keep our project going. Every bit helps.

Mark Doliner: Google Apps Mail

2008-08-17T20:57:11+00:00

I've been using a web-based email program called Open WebMail for the past 7 or 8 years (from back when it used to be called NeoMail). But my spam flagging attempts have become increasingly less effective, and Open WebMail isn't AJAXy (which makes it slower to use), and Google Mail is pretty fantastic.

So I signed kingant.net up for a Google Apps account. I'm pretty happy with it. I imported all my mail from the past 8 or so years. It takes up 995MB (14%) of the max of 7035MB.

So far it's been reasonably reliable. There was maybe an 18 hour period around August 8th where it was down and I couldn't log in at all. But I'm hoping that was a freak occurrence.

And the spam filtering is pretty good. I still get 1 or 2 spam emails a day that aren't flagged, but that's better than the 10 or 20 I was getting before. I get about 11,000 spam emails per month. That's about one every four minutes.

SamePlace: What's coming in 0.9.4

2008-08-17T16:45:55+00:00

After considerable sweeping of our bug tracker, here's the compiled list of features targeted at the next minor release. It's mostly about small/incremental improvements in usability. If you know of small fixes which would yield equally significant usability improvements, feel free to file a bug.