ScrewPile Dev

Screenshot of the new polymorphic event stream

2012-02-12T18:38:00.001-08:00

Quoddy is getting a polymorphic event stream!

2012-02-12T18:16:00.001-08:00

The big news from Quoddy land currently is that support for polymorphism in the event stream is largely in place. "What," you might be asking, "does that mean, exactly?" Well, simply put it means that different "kinds" of events can show up in the event stream now, and each event will render (display) differently (and appropriately) based on it's attributes.

For example, one event might be a simple text based status update from a friend. That will display the words the friend wrote, their profile avatar and the time they posted and that's about it. But the next event in the stream might be a link to a scheduled event from your Meetup.com iCal feed. Since it's a calendar event, it will render with a an iCal icon, the start date/time of the event, the end date/time of the event, the location, and a hyperlink to the Meetup.com event.

Similarly an event might be a document shared from Google Docs or something, and it would, again, render seamlessly into the event stream, but with the exact details, links and controls that are appropriate for the event. This is really slick stuff, and coupled with AJAX callbacks to the server, allows us to embed any manner of interactivity right into the event stream.

Somewhere down the road we might look at incorporating ~~Google~~Apache Wave functionality here, so you can do collaborative editing "in place" from the stream.

We'll have some screenshots of this stuff up soon.

Just In Time For Christmas: Neddick TPR3 is Released!

2011-12-25T04:57:00.000-08:00

Neddick Technology Preview Release 3 (tpr3) is available, just in time for Christmas! See https://github.com/fogbeam/Neddick/tree/tpr3 and enjoy!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all, from the ScrewPile team and Fogbeam Labs.

New Batch of Quoddy Screenshots

2011-07-23T18:39:00.000-07:00

Believe it or not folks, progress is being made on the Quoddy project, and the progress over the last 2-3 weeks has been substantial. I've just posted a big batch of screenshots over at G+. Check 'em out here:

https://plus.google.com/u/1/114301088526097505896/posts/3NVEkHxRVUY

ScrewPile Update 02-24-2011

2011-02-24T19:33:00.001-08:00

Activity around ScrewPile has been frantic since our last update. Neddick release TPR2 was finally released and that code has been pushed to the demo server. TPR2 features UI improvements, bugfixes related to the tagging feature, the introduction of scheduled jobs, and the addition of scheduled jobs for rebuilding the entry cache and populating channels from RSS feeds

On the Quoddy front, the user-profile support has been radically improved and the UI for editing profiles has been cleaned up considerably. A preliminary preview release should be out soon. The main feature that we want to get in for a TPR1 release of Quoddy is basic "activity stream" support (think the "Wall" feature on Facebook.)

We've also started digging into the Mahout clustering code, and are starting to look into implementing some of the neat stuff that you can do with Machine Learning and Text Mining. An "auto tagging" feature and a better "related links" feature for Neddick are on the drawing board.

See the roadmap page for more on what's coming in the short-term.

What's New With ScrewPile?

2011-01-13T19:04:00.000-08:00

Since the last post, we've made a ton of commits to Quoddy - our Open Source Enterprise Social Networking platform (which is receiving most of the attention right now.) The most recent batch of changes have been focused on LDAP integration and User Profile editing.

Specifically, we've made all use of LDAP optional (the first pass at adding LDAP support actually assumed LDAP would always be present) by finishing up the "Local Accounts" support. We also added LDAP User Import, and we now fully support a mixed authentication mode where both "Local Account" users and (optionally) external LDAP users may log in. We've also started adding some (very) primitive support for editing User Profiles, and we added the very first UNIT TEST! Yes, the intent is to have a comprehensive test suite, but we'd been neglecting that stuff while doing a lot of exploratory programming earlier.

Yeah, it's considered bad form to write the code first and retrofit the tests, but in this case we think it's going to be OK. There isn't *that* much code to test.

On that note, after cloning the repo, if you want to see the current test coverage metrics, just

[user@somehost quoddy]$ grails install-plugin code-coverage

and then

[user@somehost quoddy]$ grails test-app unit: -coverage

to generate the coverage report.

Other changes: rev'd the Grails version to 1.3.6, and switched to using Groovy 1.7.6 for development.

And that about covers it. Check the TODO or the roadmap for more on what's coming down the pike.

OpenSocial working (sort of)!

2010-12-23T00:48:00.000-08:00

The first primitive bit of OpenSocial support is now wired into Quoddy. Don't believe me? Fine, here's the first screenshot:

ScrewPile Update 12-22-2010

2010-12-22T17:32:00.001-08:00

Since our last update, a lot of work has gone into Quoddy. The latest code includes support for using LDAP for user account information, has support for creating and listing "friends" and "followers" and has some primitive activity stream stuff in place... and to top it all off, work has begun on adding OpenSocial support using Apache Shindig. The OpenSocial stuff isn't finished by any stretch of the imagination, but I hope to be able to deploy and render at least a "hello, world" Gadget sometime tonight / tomorrow morning.

To take a look at the latest changes, check the Quoddy repo on GitHub.

ScrewPile Update 12-01-2010

2010-11-30T21:01:00.001-08:00

Not a lot to report since last time... I (Phil) have been in more of a "research" mode than a "coding" mode lately, trying to get more up to speed on some of the theoretical stuff vis-a-vis Information Retrieval, Network Science and Evolutionary Computation. But expect some progress on Neddick - at least - in the near future.

In the mean-time, take a gander at some of the cool stuff that's going on over at the ASF. A lot of new projects are showing up there, that may be useful for the ScrewPile projects. In particular, there's a lot fo Semantic Web related activity going on, as well as some Content Management stuff. Check out Stanbol, Chemistry, Clerezza, and note that Jena is becoming an Apache project. Oh, and there's the little thing of Google Wave going down the path of becoming an Apache project as well. Even if you were one of those people who didn't "get" Google Wave, take a minute and look at the technology (operational transformation) behind it... this is some pretty cool stuff.

So, yeah, definitely a LOT of cool stuff going on these days in Apache land, SemWeb land, and - hopefully soon - ScrewPile land.

ScrewPile update for 07-25-2010

2010-07-25T20:36:00.000-07:00

So, what's new since last time? Well, not everything one might have hoped for, but a few Neddick bugs have been fixed at least, and progress continues on. We still hope to have Neddick TPR2 out by the end of August, and maybe a solid start on Heceta.

Specifically regarding Neddick, since last time, the bugs that have been resolved are:

~~Bug #12 - Make "tag" box work when pressing ENTER]~~ - FIXED

~~Bug #8 - Get arrows for up/down vote links~~ - FIXED

~~Bug #25 - Create scheduler mechanism for asynchronous updates~~ - FIXED

~~Bug #35 - Need scheduled job to rebuild entrycache on some periodic basis~~ - FIXED

The scheduled task stuff turned out to be pretty simple, thanks for the excellent Quartz Plugin for Grails. Now the EntryCache gets refreshed once a minute. Additionally, even though it wasn't in the bug list as a discrete bug, a problem with recalculating the score of an entry - after an upvote was removed - has been fixed.

As to what's coming next... mainly work on the next Neddick TPR, so see the Roadmap for details. The bugs on the roadmap page are now sorted (more or less) by the order in which we intend to attack them, so it should be pretty easy to tell where things are going.

And that's a wrap, for this week.

What's new with ScrewPile?

2010-07-13T18:29:00.001-07:00

Since the last post, all sorts of stuff has gone on! Things are progressing nicely, especially with Neddick. Since last time we've registered each of the ScrewPile subprojects with sited dedicated to F/OSS, such as Ohloh.net, Advogato.org, and Freshmeat.net. Source code has been pushed to GitHub and the Google Code SVN repository. We've gotten Bugzilla and IceScrum installed and configured, and we have a live Neddick demo site up and running. Additionally, documentation has been written on our development process, and some roadmap documentation has been put together. We've also put together a site at Fogbeam.org dedicated to Fogbeam's open source activities.

Not a bad week's work, eh?

So, for your browsing convenience, here are links to all the new hotness:

Neddick demo site

http://www.fogbeam.org/
http://dev.fogbeam.org/
Bugzilla
IceScrum

Development Process Doc
Neddick Roadmap

Neddick on GitHub
Quoddy on GitHub
Heceta on GitHub

Neddick on Freshmeat
Quoddy on Freshmeat
Heceta on Freshmeat

Neddick on Advogato.org
Quoddy on Advogato.org
Heceta on Advogato.org

Neddick on Ohloh.net
Quoddy on Ohloh.net
Heceta on Ohloh.net

I think that's about it. Whew...

Anyway, what's coming next? Well, all of the stuff from the Neddick roadmap, and we also need to get a proper Ant build setup, some tests written, and Hudson installed and configured to do continuous integration and automated testing.

The Neddick screencast should also be forthcoming shortly, which should be fairly enlightening.

And that's about it. Any questions, just leave a comment here, or join the ScrewPile-dev or ScrewPile-discuss Google Group and post there.

Welcome to ScrewPile

2010-07-07T20:01:00.001-07:00

Welcome! Some of you may have known this project under its old name OpenQabal. We've recently decided to rename the project amidst some other dramatic changes, and this new blog is now the home for news and updates about the project.

If you made it here by accident, or don't know exactly what ScrewPile is, let us explain:

What is it?

ScrewPile is an umbrella project, sponsored by Fogbeam Labs, which is building a suite of powerful, open-source tools for knowledge management and collaboration. ScrewPile was formerly known as OpenQabal but has been renamed, as part of an effort to develop a consistent naming pattern for related projects.

Why "ScrewPile?"

A Screwpile is a particular type of lighthouse. Fogbeam'ers like lighthouses, so we're using lighthouse related terms for all of our open source activities.

Tell Me More

The 65,000 foot overview description would go something like this:

"ScrewPile is an open-source suite of APIs, components and applications - driven by the principles of federation, composition, open protocols, and open standards - for building and enabling intelligent enterprise applications for collaboration, social-networking, knowledge management and discovery, organizational learning, Information Retrieval and decision support."

ScrewPile proper, then, is an "umbrella project" or over-arching structure for sub-projects that handle different parts of this vision. Think of how Glassfish has become an "umbrella" project for a series of related projects: OpenMQ, OpenESB, SailFin, Portal Server, etc.

With ScrewPile as the overall encompassing framework, sub-projects will deal with provide various APIs and/or applications / subsystems that are part of this overall "intelligent application" vision.

Subprojects will deal with things like: an API / system for managing tags, recommendations engine, mechanism for dealing with voting/ranking things, something for managing a social graph and allowing queries against it, etc.

Of course, as before, in a lot of areas existing open-source code exists to do these things. In that case, we may (within the letter and spirit of the respective licenses) just "borrow" existing code, possibly wrapping or modifying it to fit the model of what we're doing here. Other bits will have to be written entirely from scratch, and that's OK.

Tell Me About These Subprojects

Well, here's what we think we know about them so far:

Neddick - An interface that builds on the APIs for tagging, ranking and recommending items, to provide a platform for sharing and discovering useful links, documents, people, etc. What we have right now is pretty simplistic, but there's a LOT of room for growth in this.

Quoddy - a sort of "mini Facebook" like social-networking interface. Builds on the APIs for social-graph management, activity-stream, activity profiling, tagging, etc. Provides the front-end for managing connections and for letting users provide information about themselves, their interests, etc. But unlike Facebook, no silly Pirates vs. Ninjas or Farmville stuff.

Heceta - This may not actually come into existence as a standalone project; but the general vision is a search engine that leverages all of the various bits of information from Neddick, Quoddy, and "TBD" to provide better / deeper / more insightful search results than you can get from simple document content analysis. Intranet search in the Enterprise usually sucks, largely because page-rank type algorithms don't work well due to the lack of links between documents. But by supplementing the content analysis with scoring based on tags, social graph connections, activity-stream information, etc., it should be possible to do a much better job. This is not, by the way, a totally novel idea. It's something people are referring to as Social Search.

GraphEngine - as before, an API for storing and managing the "social graph stuff." Doing this on a large scale is still a problem, and I'm intrigued by the idea of using an incremental evaluation system approach for this, but haven't done much on this yet.

ProfileEngine - name says it all, really.

RecommenderEngine

ActivityEngine

TagEngine

Etc.

Of course since this is all intended for an enterprise setting, a big focus will be on integrating with other systems (see the point about "open protocols" and "open standards" above).

Previous discussion of Neddick (formerly code-named "Project Shelley") mentions discovering documents and people, despite the screen shots only showing stuff about links so far. That's where integration comes into play... part of the vision is to integrate with, for example, a document management system like Alfresco, a forum system like JForum, a groupware / calendar system, a HRM system like OrangeHRM and/or a social-networking application like Quoddy (formerly code-named "Project Poe").

That, of course, also plays into the vision for Heceta, which is all about searching across all the different domains, and using the knowledge aggregated across all of them, to enhance our search capability.

Get involved by visiting the project page on Google Code.