Weblog: Archive

At FOSDEM 2012 we will have a devroom related to Open Mobile Linux. Our primary goal is to facilitate meetups, collaboration and awareness between different projects and communities within Open Mobile Linux and provide a place to present directions, ideas and your projects themselves.

By Open Mobile Linux we mean any open source projects revolving around typical non-desktop/server Linux, such as handsets, tablets, netbooks or other creative uses. Examples of such projects could be Qt5, Mer, MeeGo, Android, webOS, Plasma Active, Tizen, Boot to Gecko, SHR and other related efforts.

We have the room AW1.120 with 74 seats, a video projector (VGA), wireless internet on Saturday 4th February for a total of 8 hours.

The format we will be utilizing is lightning talks of length 15 minutes with 10 minutes of questions, 5 minute changeover to next speaker. Our goal is about 15 talks during the day.

The motivation is that after each talk, you and your project will be visible to the rest of the Open Mobile Linux community and further deeper discussions into your topic with your peers can continue outside the devroom.

Please send a short biography and an abstract for your talk to carsten.munk@gmail.com by Dec 31st 2011, and we'll get back to you at latest January 7th.

We're also grateful for volunteers helping to run the devroom. Contact Carsten if you're interested.

In Suski's blog I saw a question on whether developing GNOME apps would be possible in CoffeeScript. The answer is yes. I wrote a quick example back in Desktop Summit:

# GObject Introspection APIs are available from imports.gi.Modulename
Gtk = imports.gi.Gtk

# For GNOME 3.2+ this should be Gtk.init null, 0
Gtk.init 0, null

win = new Gtk.Window
    type: Gtk.WindowType.TOPLEVEL
win.set_border_width 10
win.connect "destroy", (widget) ->
    Gtk.main_quit()

button = new Gtk.Button
    label: "Hello, world"
button.connect "clicked", ->
    button.set_label "Bar"
win.add button

button.show()
win.show()

Gtk.main()

Gjs doesn't run CoffeeScript directly, so you need to convert this before running:

$ coffee -c window.coffee 
$ gjs window.js

You should see something similar to:

I'm happy to announce that we were able to release the first stable version of the Midgard2 PHPCR provider yesterday.

Simply put, PHPCR is the future of Midgard's PHP API. Instead of having our own repository APIs, we follow the well-documented and tested PHP Content Repository specification. This allows much better compatibility with other projects, and for example the possibility to choose whether to store contents in Midgard2 or Apache Jackrabbit on per-deployment basis. This obviously doesn't mean that the current Midgard2 API is going away, but just that there is something better and more compatible available on top of that.

PHPCR provides a nice set of capabilities that are either similar to, or surpass the traditional Midgard features:

• Your content model is constructed out of a tree of Nodes that can contain other Nodes or Properties
• Properties can be of many different types, including the typical strings and floats, but also binaries (similar to our blobs) and dates
• Properties can be multivalued (think of multiple images in same property, or a person having multiple emails)
• Queries can be either constructed with Query Object Model or SQL2
• Queries support tree constraints (ISDESCENDANTNODE, ISCHILDNODE) and joins
• Content can be exported and imported via a standard XML format
• There is a comprehensive Node Type system that allows you to define your content model. The full definitions can be read and introspected via PHP
• Nodes also support mixins, allowing you to add per-object metadata
• There are also the unstructured nodes (nt:unstructured) for cases where you don't want to have constraints on what to store and how

On top of PHPCR, there is also a Doctrine ODM that the Midgard2 provider also supports. That gives you more capabilities, like:

• More traditional object access with getters and setters to the repository
• Multilingual content storage

Some code examples: https://github.com/bergie/phpcr-midgard2/tree/master/examples

You can see Midgard's test status for both SQLite and MySQL storage back-ends in our Continuous Integration environment:

Once you have Midgard2 and our PHP extension available, installation is easy. Add a composer.json file into the root folder of your project:

{
  "require": {
    "midgard/phpcr": ">=1.0"
  }
}

Install with Composer:

$ wget http://getcomposer.org/composer.phar
$ php composer.phar install

Copy MgdSchemas:

$ sudo cp vendor/midgard/phpcr/data/share/schema/* /usr/share/midgard2/schema/
$ sudo cp vendor/midgard/phpcr/data/share/views/* /usr/share/midgard2/views/

...and then just start using the repository in your application. PHPCR can obviously be used side-by-side with traditional Midgard2 or other PHP code.

What will happen next:

• Support for PHP 5.4 and Postgres (needs work on Midgard2 level)
• Performance optimization
• Features work, including versioning
• More tools for PHPCR. Think of Asgard that would allow you to work with any repositories!
• PHPCR support built-in for MidCOM and MVC?

For those interested in learning more about PHPCR, there will also be a Paris meetup in mid-January.