New Batch of Quoddy Screenshots

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

Fogcutter Update 02-24-2011

Activity around Fogcutter 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 Fogcutter?

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)!

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

Fogcutter Update 12-22-2010

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.

Fogcutter Update 12-01-2010

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 - Fogcutter land.

Fogcutter update for 07-25-2010

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.