Ocs-server 0.1 Technology Preview released! (with cats!)

Finally, after many iterations, we have something that works! The ocs-server team (Claudio Desideri and Francesco Wofford) is therefore announcing the first release of ocs-server 0.1 technology preview.

Any information and download link on community page!

What?

It currently supports PERSON, CONTENT, CONFIG, FRIEND, ACTIVITY, FAN with a partial implementation, that means for example not every parameter of uploaded contents can be handled. It then just partially works with these calls but the results are pretty neat for now.

We also built an Admin panel and a first run wizard that will help you set up your ocs-server and get it in production without needing to understand how OCS works. It can be extracted, configured painlessly and used with all major clients like libAttica, KNewStuff or our php OCSClient.

What system administrator love the most? Cars? Travels? No, documentation! That's why we started writing tutorials guiding you through server configuration and first run wizard. We also finally documented our web framework built around ocs needs and a little hacking guide is coming soon (so you can extend and/or contribute).
Our IRC channel is #ocs on freenode, feel free to ask us anything or comment below.

Plasmastore

In this tech preview release the current developing version of ocs-client, "Plasmastore", has been included as an example client implementation. A lot of parts are still in production so you may found half written, bad written or badly optimized stuff (please don't kill me for that xD). Anyway the client can successfully handle user login, logout, content download, upload and edit. I'm still working on the "friendship system" and content rating but the client has been included in the release only to have a working example that may come in handy to new users that are willing to adopt ocs-server.

Francesco Wofford (woffy)

KNewStuff and Plasma integration

We tested and fixed our server to start working with KNewStuff and we achieved our greatest result for now: we switched Plasma's background server to our local and could fetch and install a kitten background.

We also tried to insert some content in Muon and it worked too (didn't try the install phase this time because it won't work due to wrong category)! Some content attributes are missing but it's mostly there.

Is it stable?

Short answer: no. It's still a technology preview, so we're constantly adding features and bug fixing. We're sure there will be bugs we're not aware of, so this release is more a sneak peek of our work and is like a stable commit that works for experiments. We don't suggest to use this for production environment.

GSoC update: ocs-server

Hello planet! Here is a small update from the "newborn" ocs-server project.

Currently me and the guy behind the "plasmastore" client are working together very close. We're able to meet in person almost every day so that's quite amazing. I can help him build what it's mainly an ocs client.

But be prepared. We got great news ocs side! We're very close to a first testing release with some extra goodies. First, let's look at the real core of the project: the support of the ocs protocol.

At this time we support:

• CONFIG
• PERSON
• FRIEND
• ACTIVITY
• CONTENT
• FAN

Our next calls in the roadmap would be KNOWLEDGEBASE and PRIVATE DATA. We also did some theorical test on NewStuff compatibility and it /should/ work altough never tested mainly because it works if queried by libAttica used in Gluon Player. We also found some parts of the protocol to be obscure or not well documented, so we contacted Frank, which is the protocol mantainer (correct me if I'm wrong), and came up with the possibility to troubleshoot and/or extend the protocol itself, which is amazing. Me and Francesco thought about the possibility of adding support for HASHTAGS and we're writing a more formal proposal to be sent to review.

I also prepared an Admin Panel that is quite ready to go, used by admins to administrate the ocs-server. It can run some tests on server status checking what works and what it's still broken, and can also administer content categories.
Along with the admin panel, there's the first run install wizard that will guide you in installing and configuring the ocs-server with the local/remote database and some other basics configurations.

My aim is to release an alpha (that will surely contain bugs) within one week, with all the documentation on our community wiki page:
https://community.kde.org/Ocs-server

So everyone that will need a server that handles a generic type of social content with users management and an open interface with plenty of tools (php with our OCSClient library, libAttica, newstuff etc...) for quickly writing clients we got it!

Ah, last thing! I'll be at Akademy this year so feel free to come and talk to me, as I'm a bit shy!

Ideas to restructure Plasma content delivery system

Last years at Gluon

During the past few years at Gluon Project we chose to adopt OCS (Open Collaboration Services) protocol in our distribution system, developing a minimal and working server and client that works on GamingFreedom.org. Gluon, however, never went into full production so people couldn't test our infrastructure and the distribution system never went above the "experimental phase".

Our mission

1) Develop further our OCS server in order to have it usable by every project that needs it. In this phase we'll need to refactor and prepare it to be installable and configurable easily. We'll include install/config scripts with a nice interface. It also will be full Attica/NewStuff compliant.

2) Implement Desktop and web client that will let users download and use content like apps, backgrounds, themes etc. The Desktop client will be written in Qt/QML and the web client will be web based.

We want in the end users to be able to get user created content for Plasma in an easy way from one single common place as well as for creators to upload it. Our secondary target is to unify Gluon and Plasma content server and implement user / login capabilities via KDE Identity in order to have a centralized infrastructure. Our dream is to have a common desktop environment experience also regarding the content distribution system across all distributions

This is a scheme of the future structure:

Technology stack

We have in plan to develop OCS server and client libraries at the same time, creating a full set of classes that are shared between the both libs. This will enhance manteinability and modularity having a php library for both uses that shares most of the model codebase.

Now, having a working server we imagined the Plasma web client to be built on top of the OCS client library (of course), using php/mysql (or generic sql database) and for the client part HTML, CSS, a bit of jQuery and maybe the opensource library famo.us (we still need to do some feasibility studies on this latest).

Why

• Openess of OCS protocol, simple interface in human-readable REST / XML / JSON
• Ownership of KDE project of their content distribution system (we'll have a full working in-house implementation)
• Merge of Gluon games, backgrounds, themes etc... all in a single place, with a single unique login on KDE Identity. This also enhances in users the concept of KDE as a full desktop environment with the same content across various distribution opposed to other semi-proprietary implementations (like Canonical's one)
• Modularity of the server and clients. OCS is a wide protocol and potentials are there. For example I implemented a real-time chat between users in Gluon Player. This could give us some ideas to brainstorm.

Projects

• ocs-server at https://projects.kde.org/projects/playground/www/ocs-server, and Gluon Player (includes gluon player libraries that wraps libattica)
   written by me, Claudio :)
• "Plasma AppStore" (name is just a placeholder), consisting in Desktop client and Web client, by Francesco Wofford, my guest in this blog post

We already started to work on a few prototypes because we really care about this project so we're asking for feedback from all of you. We're going to propose those projects as GSoC with KDE so feel free to drop your comments below. We need them!

Have a nice day! And have a cookie! :)