Notes from the Rave meetup at ApacheCon 9 November

[Sander van der Waal <sa...@gmail.com>]

Please find below my scribbles from the Rave meet-up at ApacheCon this
week. Thanks everyone for a very fruitful meeting and I look forward to
following things up.

BTW, I can very well have missed out on some stuff or perhaps even
misinterpreted what's been said - just let me know!

Rave Meetup – 9 November 2011, ApacheCon Vancouver

1. Road to graduation.

Rave already has a diverse community, could graduate soon; however:
- We need to prove that we can embed new people in the project
- Once we have proven that we can accomodate new stakeholders it will be
a viable project for graduation.

2. Related projects

Glad to have had two people present from the new Sakai project

Sakai CLE (v2) - Traditional Course Management System
Sakai OAE (v3) - Different role with learning proces
- Emphasis on creating and sharing content
- Nearly all readers also writers of content
- NYU & Berkeley have it currently in pilot
- Flowing content, pulling in widgets and functionality from an OBR (OSGi)
- No choice for social standard, could be OpenSocial
- Widgets custom built, no particular standard used (although very
similar to OpenSocial)
Rave is also pulling in widgets and gadgets, not locked-down

Sakai is governed by a big committee of committees. On the other hand,
Rave already has a large involvement from academic sector so is used to
working with the academic sector and has proven that it possible.
We think Rave is ready.

Sakai developer Nicolaas Matthijs at CARET, working with John Norman
Ross to set up a meeting with them and OSS Watch

OMELETTE project
http://www.ict-omelette.eu/home
- No one present could really comment on this EU project.
- We'd love to hear more from Scott Wilson who indicated before the
meeting that people of the OMELETTE project "were really into
the idea of using Rave and Wookie as their basic platform and having
more partners make contributions back in areas like inter-widget
communications (with the folks from ROLE we met at apache hackathon in
Amsterdam), import/export and sharing of 'workspaces' (pages), page
lifecycle management, implementing WebID sign on, and lots of other
things."

Bamboo project
http://www.projectbamboo.org/
- Consortium of 20 odd univeristies, mostly US-based, Mellon-funded
- Building applications and shared infrastructure for humanities research.
- Team in Oxford currently basing their portal on COIN from SURF-net
- Working to build their project on SURF code that is not really
maintained by SURF maintained, as SURF will move to Rave (Q2 2012?)
- Sander (OSS Watch) working with the team in Oxford to see how we can
help them to migrate to Rave, eg. what are the most important features
they'd need in?

ROLE project
http://sourceforge.net/projects/role-project/
- Using the Rave frontend with their own widget-based backend
- EU project started three year ago
- Video shown http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzAZNaLrZcU
- XMPP used for interwidget communication
- Jasha going to a workshop of theirs
- What can we commit to make them commitment to get the code over
manageable?
- What is missing in Rave?
- What's the barrier to submitting code?
- Project is BSD & Apache licensed.
- More importantly, who are the people involved?
- Project member Jevgeni already active on the lists (eg. Shindig) to
submit patches
- It's considered good for EU projects to get code into existing projects
- People tend to follow their code
- OSS Watch will engage via Open University & Leicester Unviersity

Wookie
- Scott wants inter-widget communication into Wookie
- That won't necesarily help Rave project

3. Home for gadgets / widgets and templating
- Rave in Context templates
- Generic template code currently in Wookie
- Gadgets and widgets will be built, a few critical should be owned by Rave
- But having a catalogue that we could wire into would be great
- Number of catalogues exist, Scott talking to have them open-source these

- OBR used in Sakai, specifically to OSGi but the concept is similar
- Should look at how Maven solved a similar problem

- Mitre built a federated widget marketplace specifically for gov
- Can for example connect to other widget stores
- Model to have Rave define an API of how to

Use cases:
- User wants to connect to a widget
- You can add them by adding them to the store - where from?
- Once chosen, leverage by adding them to your page

Ross to create a project 'Rave extras' project on Apache extras
- 'Rave extras' to deposit widgets / gadgets code on a seperate project site
- Rave demo gadgets can be moved over
- Let's also define what that catalogue would look like and put into apache
extras
- Leverage the possbility for people to build widgets/gadgets and have a
place to host them
- Extras site will be less restricted, eg. encourage other projects like
Sakai and Callback (fka Phonegap) to use it.
- First focus on creating widgets / gadgets, less focussed on hosting them

Current solution in Sakai:
- UI for attaching to existing widgets
- Possible to install additional functionality through an OBR, using the
MANIFEST to define additional resources

Rave in context templates
http://code.google.com/a/apache-extras.org/p/rave-in-context/
- For example to search and browse lists using jQuery mobile
- Use templates as wiring to generate the build for creating
the widget
- Seen as first step to create more elaborate tooling
- Project itself is short and nearly finishe
- Need to allow people to easily create new gadgets / widgets
- Separate need to customise them
- EU project WIDGaT allows you to customise areas of the widgets,
specifically for people with disabilities http://arc.tees.ac.uk/WIDGAT/
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/ltig/widgat.aspx
- Gadgets have a preference store that help you tweak it
The need was felt that a separate home would be the best place, but no
decision was made.

4. ODF/OOo gadgets
- Not to be pushed by us
- If Don or others interested we'll welcome them


Sander

Re: Notes from the Rave meetup at ApacheCon 9 November

[Raminderjeet Singh <ra...@gmail.com>]

Thanks Sander for detailed notes. They are really helpful. You are wonderful. 

Raminder
On Nov 12, 2011, at 11:08 PM, Sander van der Waal wrote:

> Please find below my scribbles from the Rave meet-up at ApacheCon this
> week. Thanks everyone for a very fruitful meeting and I look forward to
> following things up.
> 
> BTW, I can very well have missed out on some stuff or perhaps even
> misinterpreted what's been said - just let me know!
> 
> Rave Meetup – 9 November 2011, ApacheCon Vancouver
> 
> 1. Road to graduation.
> 
> Rave already has a diverse community, could graduate soon; however:
> - We need to prove that we can embed new people in the project
> - Once we have proven that we can accomodate new stakeholders it will be
> a viable project for graduation.
> 
> 2. Related projects
> 
> Glad to have had two people present from the new Sakai project
> 
> Sakai CLE (v2) - Traditional Course Management System
> Sakai OAE (v3) - Different role with learning proces
> - Emphasis on creating and sharing content
> - Nearly all readers also writers of content
> - NYU & Berkeley have it currently in pilot
> - Flowing content, pulling in widgets and functionality from an OBR (OSGi)
> - No choice for social standard, could be OpenSocial
> - Widgets custom built, no particular standard used (although very
> similar to OpenSocial)
> Rave is also pulling in widgets and gadgets, not locked-down
> 
> Sakai is governed by a big committee of committees. On the other hand,
> Rave already has a large involvement from academic sector so is used to
> working with the academic sector and has proven that it possible.
> We think Rave is ready.
> 
> Sakai developer Nicolaas Matthijs at CARET, working with John Norman
> Ross to set up a meeting with them and OSS Watch
> 
> OMELETTE project
> http://www.ict-omelette.eu/home
> - No one present could really comment on this EU project.
> - We'd love to hear more from Scott Wilson who indicated before the
> meeting that people of the OMELETTE project "were really into
> the idea of using Rave and Wookie as their basic platform and having
> more partners make contributions back in areas like inter-widget
> communications (with the folks from ROLE we met at apache hackathon in
> Amsterdam), import/export and sharing of 'workspaces' (pages), page
> lifecycle management, implementing WebID sign on, and lots of other
> things."
> 
> Bamboo project
> http://www.projectbamboo.org/
> - Consortium of 20 odd univeristies, mostly US-based, Mellon-funded
> - Building applications and shared infrastructure for humanities research.
> - Team in Oxford currently basing their portal on COIN from SURF-net
> - Working to build their project on SURF code that is not really
> maintained by SURF maintained, as SURF will move to Rave (Q2 2012?)
> - Sander (OSS Watch) working with the team in Oxford to see how we can
> help them to migrate to Rave, eg. what are the most important features
> they'd need in?
> 
> ROLE project
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/role-project/
> - Using the Rave frontend with their own widget-based backend
> - EU project started three year ago
> - Video shown http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzAZNaLrZcU
> - XMPP used for interwidget communication
> - Jasha going to a workshop of theirs
> - What can we commit to make them commitment to get the code over
> manageable?
> - What is missing in Rave?
> - What's the barrier to submitting code?
> - Project is BSD & Apache licensed.
> - More importantly, who are the people involved?
> - Project member Jevgeni already active on the lists (eg. Shindig) to
> submit patches
> - It's considered good for EU projects to get code into existing projects
> - People tend to follow their code
> - OSS Watch will engage via Open University & Leicester Unviersity
> 
> Wookie
> - Scott wants inter-widget communication into Wookie
> - That won't necesarily help Rave project
> 
> 3. Home for gadgets / widgets and templating
> - Rave in Context templates
> - Generic template code currently in Wookie
> - Gadgets and widgets will be built, a few critical should be owned by Rave
> - But having a catalogue that we could wire into would be great
> - Number of catalogues exist, Scott talking to have them open-source these
> 
> - OBR used in Sakai, specifically to OSGi but the concept is similar
> - Should look at how Maven solved a similar problem
> 
> - Mitre built a federated widget marketplace specifically for gov
> - Can for example connect to other widget stores
> - Model to have Rave define an API of how to
> 
> Use cases:
> - User wants to connect to a widget
> - You can add them by adding them to the store - where from?
> - Once chosen, leverage by adding them to your page
> 
> Ross to create a project 'Rave extras' project on Apache extras
> - 'Rave extras' to deposit widgets / gadgets code on a seperate project site
> - Rave demo gadgets can be moved over
> - Let's also define what that catalogue would look like and put into apache
> extras
> - Leverage the possbility for people to build widgets/gadgets and have a
> place to host them
> - Extras site will be less restricted, eg. encourage other projects like
> Sakai and Callback (fka Phonegap) to use it.
> - First focus on creating widgets / gadgets, less focussed on hosting them
> 
> Current solution in Sakai:
> - UI for attaching to existing widgets
> - Possible to install additional functionality through an OBR, using the
> MANIFEST to define additional resources
> 
> Rave in context templates
> http://code.google.com/a/apache-extras.org/p/rave-in-context/
> - For example to search and browse lists using jQuery mobile
> - Use templates as wiring to generate the build for creating
> the widget
> - Seen as first step to create more elaborate tooling
> - Project itself is short and nearly finishe
> - Need to allow people to easily create new gadgets / widgets
> - Separate need to customise them
> - EU project WIDGaT allows you to customise areas of the widgets,
> specifically for people with disabilities http://arc.tees.ac.uk/WIDGAT/
> http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/ltig/widgat.aspx
> - Gadgets have a preference store that help you tweak it
> The need was felt that a separate home would be the best place, but no
> decision was made.
> 
> 4. ODF/OOo gadgets
> - Not to be pushed by us
> - If Don or others interested we'll welcome them
> 
> 
> Sander