Rego’s Everyday Life

Yesterday, NavalPlan community met at #navalplan channel on IRC. Even when most of us are igalians, also some other external people attended and participated in the meeting. We’re really glad to see that project community is growing bit by bit.

In the meeting we defined the roadmap for next release, more info in the official piece of news. This was the first public meeting of NavalPlan and, IMHO, it worked quite well, so we’ll repeat the experience in the future.

BTW, Igalia web group is looking for a new hacker to help us keep rocking on the web free software world. Send us your resume if you’re interested.

Past week we published the first stable version of NavalPlan, you can read the announcement for more information about version 1.0.

In this post I’d like to highlight some numbers around NavalPlan development. You can easily check the amount of work done with a quick review to the following numbers:

• Time: We have been working in the project for 21 months (from April 2009 to January 2011).
• Developers: 14 people have committed code in the repository, being the core team composed by 11 developers:
  • Jacobo Aragunde Pérez
  • Fernando Bellas Permuy
  • José María Casanova Crespo
  • Xavier Castaño García
  • Óscar González Fernández
  • Susana Montes Pedreira
  • Francisco Javier Morán Rúa
  • Diego Pino García
  • Manuel Rego Casasnovas
  • Farruco Sanjurjo Arcay
  • Lorenzo Tilve Álvaro
• Lines: We have written 152677 lines (according to SLOCCount) most of them in Java (144095 lines).
• Commits: 5315 commits have been pushed in master branch till 1.0 release, being Óscar the top committer with almost half of them (2449 commits).
• Bugs: 796 bugs have been reported in the bugtracker, where 628 bugs have been fixed for version 1.0.

Finally, I would like to publicly thank the whole team for their effort during this time. Thank you all, we have reached an important step where we have a stable release of the product available for end users. NavalPlan 1.0 is here! We should be really proud

PS: You can find these numbers and more information related with development in NavalPlan page at Ohloh. Ohloh is a nice website about free software projects, which extracts information directly from source code repositories.

During this week and as part of the work packing NavalPlan for 1.0 release, I’ve been working in create Ubuntu PPAs for NavalPlan project. I’ve decided to use PPAs because is a really nice way to publish your last development and make it easily available for end users.

Now if you want to install NavalPlan in Ubuntu you will just need to run the following commands:sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mrego/navalplan
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install navalplan

And you will have automatically installed last version of NavalPlan in your computer. Even more, when a new version is released you will be automatically notified by Ubuntu package manager and you could easily upgrade to the newer version.

PS: As you can read we have released NavalPlan 1.0 version today. I’ll write a post next week talking about this important release. But, for the moment, you could take advantage of PPAs, any other built packages or the on-line demo to test the project and provide us feedback.

Last week we add the latest features for first NavalPlan stable version. This week and the next one we are going to work hard in order to test the application and fix a lot of bugs. After this phase we should be doing 1.0 release during first week of January.

Talking about past week, we added 2 small features that, in my humble opinion, are really important for end-users:

• New project wizard (by Susana)

  

  When you create a project you will need to fill a small popup with general data about the project. After that you will be redirected to WBS tab where you could easily add the tasks that compose your project.

• New tasks are scheduled by default (by Óscar)

  

  People usually have problems to create Gantt charts in NavalPlan, this was because you need to explicitly mark as scheduled the tasks added in the WBS tab. From now on, tasks are scheduled by default, so you wouldn’t need to worry about this issue. Just remember that if you don’t want to schedule all the tasks in your WBS, you still have the chance to unschedule some tasks using the proper icon .

  

  Then if you go to Project Scheduling view, don’t forget to save the current project before, you will get a Gantt chart like the one in the image, where you could start to add dependencies and allocate resources.

You can enjoy this new features in the on-line demo and also in the last Debian package. We hope you find them useful

Lately I’ve been spending my hackfest time in a new idea that seems to me like a nice test. The idea basically was to create a desktop application with a web interface for Grilo using WebKitGTK+. That would let me to play with some projects in which my mates are working, taking advantage to test the new features of HTML5 and JavaScript interfaces.

Then I started to code a small GNOME application called Web Grilo Player (it looks like a suitable and very imaginative name ). The application is written in C and use WebKitGTK+ DOM bindings to manage the interface. For the moment it’s just able to navigate media sources provided by Grilo and it already shows images and reproduce audio and video using specific HTML5 tags. You can find the source code at Git repository.

As I said, it’s just a test and right now the interface looks really horrible but, at least, it works as I can show you in the following video.

Finally, I hope to find time to keep working on it and start to play with more HTML5 and JavaScript features in order to improve current interface.

We continue taking steps to open NavalPlan development. This week we’ve made public the project wiki where you can find information about the development, like for example which tasks we’re currently working on.

One important point is that we’ve already defined a roadmap for the project and, if everything goes right, we’ll have a first stable release at the beginning of 2011. This would mean that version 1.0 will be released. Moreover we’ve agreed to publish new stable versions of the product each 3 months, in order to make easier end-users life, you can check the plan in the wiki.

We’re doing our bests in order to achieve our goals and reach version 1.0 on time. More news coming soon, stay tuned

Last weekend I’ve been giving the last lesson of the Web module at Master on Software Libre. In this lesson we’ve tried to advance as much as possible in the practice that the students are developing for this module, a web application using Java technologies: Maven, Hibernate, Jetty and ZK.

The last part of this practice has the aim to create web services around this web application based on REST standard. In order to properly explain how this goal could be achieved I’ve created a small example that could be useful for more people.

The Java API for RESTful Web Services is called JAX-RS (and it’s defined at JSR-311) and the reference implementation is Jersey. I’ve tried to find an example using Jersey, Jetty and Maven about how to add REST web services to a Java application, after failing in my search I decided to start my own example based in a post by Tim Reardon.

These kind of services are intended to import/export data from/to a web application, the most common formats are XML and JSON. For this example I decided to use XML, using JAXB standard to map Java classes to XML files.

The final result is a simple application implementing the different HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT and DELETE) that could help to other developers as example. Along with several bash scripts to to test the web service, I’ve also added a basic client written in Java. You can find the example application uploaded to Gitorious and you can download the source code from there.

During the last months we’ve been working on the new Igalia website, maybe you have already heard something about it . In this post I’d try to gather some useful information about the development of this project. We’re really glad with the fact that people seems happy with the final result and we promise to keep this new webpage more updated that the last one.

First of all, as you can expect the website has been developed using TYPO3 as content management system (one of our expertise areas inside the web group). I’d like to highlight some extensions used:

• TemplaVoila! (templavoila): That makes really easy to adapt the design to our needs.
• News (tt_news): Specially the database structure provided by this extension, that has been adapted to support areas, projects, igalians and even commits in the new webpage.
• Ameos Formidable (ameos_formidable): Even when we don’t have a lot forms, Formidable is heavily used in the whole website, all the listers and detail views are provided by this great extension.
• Yet Another Feed Importer (yafi): A nice extension that allows us to import all kind of data via RSS feeds (posts, commits, …).
• mnoGoSearch (mnogosearch): The search engine selected for the web.

Moreover, we haven’t just used these extensions, we have also contributed to some of them reporting some bugs and providing some patches to add new behavior.

Finally, we’d like that everybody enjoys the new website so any comment, suggestion, bug report, whatever is welcomed.

Since May 2009 a group of igalians have been working in a web application called NavalPlan. Maybe, you already know this project because of it was already presented by my mate Xavi in his blog some time ago. We’ve been very busy with this project (you can check it in the ohloh page) but now we can devote some time to the free software side of the project.

On the one hand, NavalPlan is licensed under AGPL. This license is really interesting for web apps because, if you simply use GPL, someone could modify your application and run it in a server without publish the changes (this doesn’t mean redistribute, it’s just serve). However, using AGPL it’s necessary that all the modified source code becomes available to the community if it’s used in a network server.

On the other hand, we used a public Git repository at git.igalia.com from the very beginning. But, this week we’ve moved the repository to SourceForge.net together with other resources like: mailing lists, forums, … (see the piece of news about that for more info).

To sum up, from now on we’re going to use these public resources available at NavalPlan page at SourceForge.net. We would be very grateful if we get some feedback from new users, developers and contributors trough them.

This week I’ve been taking a look to a TYPO3 extension to import RSS feeds called Yet Another Feed Importer (yafi).

This extension works really nice, but I miss one feature. I’m going to import blog posts to a TYPO3 website and I’d like to keep the categories already associated with the original post also related with the news imported in the website.

An example:

• Import one post that has the categories TYPO3 and PHP in the RSS
• If you have defined in your website the category TYPO3
• Then the tt_news record imported will be related with TYPO3 category

Finally, I’ve implemented it, you can find a patch at TYPO3 Forge. Also some little bugfixes for yafi extension.

This together with gl_pages_cat could help to feed your website automatically showing only related news on every categorized page.

PD: An inspirational post by Federico Mena today:

[...] If you don’t “git push” today, your day was a waste of time.