Open Collaboration Services and libattica on MeeGo

I am going to write about my most recent contributions to libattica. Libattica, is a library in KDE implementing a client for the Open Collaboration Services protocol (OCS). OCS is a Free Desktop specification, with the purpose of integrating web communities and web based services into desktop applications. This is very general though, more specifically, it allows users to browse and share content like applications, wallpapers, etc. All this done with the typical social features, a user can write comments, rate content, contact other people, access knowledge base, etc.

Thanks to Intel hiring Collabora for sponsoring all the work I have done in libattica so far. The efforts have been mainly directed to make use of the OCS protocol in the MeeGo Garage project. The MeeGo Garage Client uses libattica to connect with the OCS servers. OCS is actually quite large, and we are just using using a small part of it (just the content and the comments modules), and I would even say we are using it in a way it was not originally meant, but that in the end it matched the requirements we had.

I also want to give thanks to Collabora, the company I work for, for sponsoring my attendance to Akademy 2010, my first Akademy actually, and I hope to be there every year :). I met in Finland a lot of nice people in th KDE world, and we had several meetings regarding OCS stuff with the people interested in it, Frank Karlitschek, Frederik Gladhorn, Daniel Wilms, Henri Bergius, Cornelius Schumacher among many others. In particular we made good progress on drafting next version of OCS spec, with several updates needed by MeeGo Garage project and other projects. The OCS draft spec 1.6 is online. Most of the features are already implemented and tested and will be ready to use in upcoming release of libattica 0.2.0. Just to mention some features where I put some effort:

• Comments (for content and other items)
• New scale for voting
• GPG fingerprint and signatures
• New download type to describe a content specified by a package name and repository
• Summary field in content
• Icons in content items
• Licenses
• Video files in content items
• Home page entries
• Distributions

Not only that, but there were a lot of ideas generated that had to be postponed to OCS version 2.0 version, which I hope we can start to work soon.

Frank has been very helpful in providing test servers available for me to test the client, and implement in the server the parts of the spec I needed to test the client. Fredrik was very helpful in making me become a KDE contributor.

Finally, libattica seems will be part of MeeGo, since it is a Qt-only library, no real dependency on other KDE stuff. In case you want to dig more on OCS and/or libattica you can check the following places:

• Open Collaboration Services
• Reference implementations for client and server
• Join to the mailing list ocs@lists.freedesktop.org
• Join to the IRC channel #ghns in irc.freenode.net