May 25, 2009

Web-izing YaST

As you may know, are working on making YaST functionality accessible via the web. With this we mean not only browser. The current prototype has two parts: a generic web service (REST like API) and a web browser client.

Stefan Schubert announced last week a new snapshot for developers. You can find packages in the build service project. The packages are named yast2-webservice and yast2-webclient.

This is very early code. It is not fast, and the web client is not yet using all user interface possibilities that ajax gives, but there are we going :-) .

If you are an experienced user, and you get it running, you may be interested in getting it running from source code by reading our development web page. Both the webservice and the webclient are rails applications. Developing modules is also easy! Just show up in irc (freenode) #yast.

May 24, 2009

Facebook on Kopete, take II

Last week I blogged about Facebook support for Kopete, just after I was able to see my buddies for first time on the screen.

Since then I have made some improvements to message handling and other code cleanups. The code is now available in a git repository at github.

As KDE’s svn trunk is frozen, I will keep it there for now.

You can get packages for openSUSE Factory (version 0.1.2). I gave up trying to build it for openSUSE 11.1, as Kopete API has changed quite a bit. However the package may build on 11.1 plus the KDE 4.2+ repositories. You need libqjson from Flavio Castelli installed (or -devel package if you want to build it).

Roadmap for next 0.1.3:

  • Add caching to avoid downloading the pictures every 3 minutes.
  • More bugfixes

Roadmap for later:

  • Look into adding , searching, and other stuff.

Be aware. This is weeks-old-code. It has not been tested much and has lot of debug messages. Use it if you are a early adopter only.

May 20, 2009

Facebook support: First milestone reached

So, I have been working some weeks on this, and today I reached the first “usable” point. Screenshot:

facebook screenshot

As you may know, Facebook has a chat service. For me at least is slowly becoming the place where I have more people talking to me, and as you may also guess, the value of social systems is very tied to the number of users.

Sadly, Facebook guys where not smart enough as the Google guys and brought yet another damn protocol to this protocol overpopulated world. Then came the worst part. They announced something that was not there and promised Jabber support. One year later nothing has yet happened.

For a such popular service, one starts to think whether waiting another year is worth for a protocol that is so popular. As I wanted it myself now, at some point I decided I was willing to implement it even if a Jabber version was available later.

We already have the problem that users expect to see Google talk in the Kopete list, because developers don’t figure out that grandma does not know what Jabber/XMPP is. So a good improvement would be adding the concept of “services” where we could add a protocol by just saying “it is just jabber, but with this server settings, this logo and this name”. That path would allow for a easy move to other XMPP protocols later.

But for Facebook, no more wait. Yesterday I was able to use it for first time to chat, so I am blogging about it.

Next steps:

  • Add more error handling
  • Fix a bug in the contacts status when they go offline
  • Put it into kopete or playground svn
  • Make an openSUSE package ;-)
  • Cleanup. I started over the testbed plugin and it added some stuff that probably I don’t need
  • Proxy support. I coded the engine using QNetworkAccessManager so it is KDE independent. Only the Kopete plugin is KDE based, so I haven’t looked into proxy support and other stuff

Other stuff with less priority:

  • Adding contacts from the client
  • Configuration (there is no much to configure)