I got a new diagram!!!1!11!! It’s based on my previous one, but slightly more elaborate, and a lot less messy, as I now used Dia to create it

Legend:

• Striped lines: Existing components where code will be copied from, or based upon.
• Full lines: Components of the complete deployment model.
• Thick full lines: Core components (of the deployment model) that I definitely want to have completed during GSoC.

Since my previous post about my Google Summer of Code project I have been poking at the new MediaWiki installer to see what’s there already, how it is there, and how I can integrate it with the above deployment model. I’ve made a bunch of style and documentation improvements while going over the code, and renamed some things to make more sense. And I had Tim Starling clean up a bad svn commit I made

So what I’m doing now is splitting the current ‘Installer’ class, which is part of the new installer, into 2: Installer and CoreInstaller. Installer will hold general installer functionality and be part of the whole deployment model, while CoreInstaller will hold installer functionality specific to core, and will be part of the new installer. After that I can create an initial version of CoreInstallers counterpart: ExtensionInstaller.

                          

Today my MediaWiki.org user page is one year old – I created the first version on July 20, 2009. With my SVN account also approaching it’s first birthday, I can now say I’m doing MediaWiki development for a year. A lot has happened in this year.

I created the Maps and Semantic Maps extensions, and have continues releasing big and small updates the whole year long. At the end of 2009 I created the Validator extension to facilitate parameter handling in Maps and Semantic Maps. In early 2010 I was contracted by the Wikimedia Foundation to create the Storyboard extension, and by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology to do work on Semantic MediaWiki. In May 2010 I started working on my Google Summer of Code 2010 project to create an extension management platform for MediaWiki. In between all these things I made various contributions to other extensions, including Semantic Forms, Semantic Internal Objects, Page Object Model, Semantic Compound Queries, Semantic Result Formats and Approved Revisions.

Next to all the code I created and released, I also attended several events and gave a number of presentations. These events include SMWCamp 2009 in Karlsruhe, the Berlin developers workshop in April and Wikimania 2010 in Gdansk.

I’m currently all time MediaWiki comitter #18, with 1080 commits. Looking forward to all the awesome stuff I can do in the coming year

                          

A lot has happened in my Google Summer of Code project since my last blog post about it, so here is another update. I did give a short presentation about it at Wikimania 2010, but that did not go very well unfortunately. You can get the slides though.

I changed the goals of my project again, from building an extension management platform build onto the Deployment Framework and Configure to creating a more general Deployment base on which the new MediaWiki installer and extension management can run. The reason for this change is that it makes a lot more sense from a technical perspective. The work done by the MediaWiki installer, and the still-to-be-created realized extension management is very similar after all. Because of this change I renamed the project from Extension Management Platform to Deployment.

Goals

So let’s have a look at what my idea of the end product is, from an users perspective. There would be 4 new special pages with the extension management functionality, largely based on what you can do in WordPress:

• Special:Install: On this page administrators can browse and search through extensions that are in the connected repository. This can be very basic to start with, but should eventually include filtering on categories and keywords, popularity, rating, ect.
• Special:Update: Checks for updates for both core and extensions, and shows update options for individual components, or the whole deal.
• Special:Extensions: A page listing all installed extensions, with options to uninstall, disable and upgrade them, as well as links to documentation, ect. Once MediaWiki has a configuration database, links to configure the extensions can also be included here.
• Special:Dashboard: A dashboard for administrators containing update information and fancy stuff like statistics.

The new MediaWiki installer would also have support for installation extension on initial run, and be able to do a complete core upgrade, instead of just a database update as is now the case.

Technical

This is a rough draft of how I see the structure of the end product, and where the code is coming from:

I’m in search of a quick and easy diagram tool to make a cleaner and more elaborate version

Stuff we already have

The underneath items have been completed, or require only a little work.

• Web interface for the core installer.
• Database abstraction for the installer.
• CLI interface for the core installer? (in progress)
• Core installer class with database install and upgrade capabilities.
• Filesystem abstraction (I ported this from WP (see code here), mostly done, no testing done yet though).

Stuff that’s still needed

• Everything related to detecting updates, fetching packages and instructions, ect. The DF has some nice stuff that can be used here, so does WP. It’s be nice to also have an abstraction layer here, so multiple mechanisms can be used here. An extension repository also needs to be set up, preferably on mediawiki.org.
• Filesystem support for the installer, so it can be used to upgrade MW by clicking a button and then just fetching the new release and doing all the work. This can be achieved by creating the generic installer class and making the core installer inherit from it.
• Extension installer class and the special pages that provide an interface to it.
• Extension support for the core installer: installation and upgrade. This can be done by re-using the code of the special pages.
• CLI support for extension management

Work done

This is a list of the work I have so far done during this project, oldest first.

• I researched all involved components and created the above draft.
• I ported the WordPress filesystem abstraction classes (base class, FTP and direct one).
• I got core commit access (yay!), so I now can make changes to the new installer.

Roadmap

A rather loose planning of what I’m planning to do next:

• Finish porting SSH2 filesystem abstraction class.
• Figure out how to make the whole system secure.
• Create installer class, adapt to core installer to work with this, and also create the extension installer class.
• Take care of the fetching stuff.
• Create the interfaces.

I’ll update the deployment wiki page as I make progress, but probably won’t make a lot of blog posts about it, as I want to focus on the work itself. Suggestions are welcome on the discussion page.

                          

Last 3 days I’ve been at the 2010 edittion of Wikimania, one of the biggest yearly wiki events. This year it was in Gdansk, Poland. I went by Plane from Eindhoven, together with Maarten, a moderator on the Dutch Wikipedia with >5 year history, who drove me to the airport.

I’ll start with the things that where not nice, basically the heat and the dormitories. It was 30+ °C practically the whole time, and the dormitory I stayed in, which was reserved by the event organizers for the attendees, was more like a sauna then a dormitory. It was located right next to a viaduct, so when opening the window at night, you’d get a lot of noise. On the last night the people from the event could not stay at that dormitory, and had to go somewhere else. Me and another attendee from Belgium got assigned some dormitory a few km away from the event. Saying this was a crappy one is an understatement. Furthermore, the payment was not arranged, so we had to pay for staying, while it should have been done by the event organizers as we paid for it?!!  In any case, this amounted to me having less then 10 hours of sleep over 4 nights And they don’t have Club Mate in Gdansk o_O!!!

I think the event itself was great, with lots of interesting talks,  awesome people and good food.

On the first day I missed the keynote since my flight arrived to late to see it, and only followed some non-technical talks, of which the most notable one was about Liquid Threads, the totally awesome extension by Andrew Garrett and now also some other people. I left early, skipping the deinner and following events, and went straight to the dormitory, to get some sleep (which failed >_>)

I gave 2 talks, one about my Google Summer of Code project, now titled Deployment, and one about Maps and Semantic Maps, both on the second day. The Deployment talk went pretty bad, as I was extremely tired. Hopefully I got the core message across of the importance of having a solid and user friendly way of deployment. Apologies to all the people I forgot to give credits to! Daniel Kinzler had some interesting security concerns which we discussed later on the day, together with Markus.

On the second day of the event there was a series of Semantic MediaWiki talks and workshops, kicked off by a presentation about the concept and what SMW has become over the past 5 years by Markus. This was followed by a workshop by Hans-Jörg Happel and Frank Dengler about Semantic Result Formats. Daniel Herzig gave a talk about AskTheWiki, and promising extension he is developing. There where two more SMW related talks focusing on the advantages of SMW and how it can be deployed. Later on the second day I gave my talk about Maps and Semantic Maps, preceded by one of Tim Alder, who presented the capabilities of the geo-related work on the toolserver. Luckily I was awake to some extend during this talk, and it went reasonably well IMO, although I had to rush through it, cause of to little time.

The second day was closed by the word premier of the movie “Truth in Numbers“, which aims at giving people an idea about the goals of the Wikimedia Foundation, and how it works. It shows arguments from both people involved or enthusiastic about the foundation, and those who think the world is going to explode if you go to Wikipedia for whatever reason. It will be interesting to see how this movie gets distributed and what effect it will have. I’m a little sad about how the creators choose to distribute it though, as it will require you to pay for it. It would be a lot more awesome if it was free with a big donate button. All the footage, which is a lot more then what’s seen in the movie itself includes, but not edited, will be released for free under a creative commons (or similar?) licence though.

The third day I found the most enjoyable as I did get some amount of sleep the night before. (In other words, I was awake enough again to program during the talks : ) The most interesting talk for me I followed here was definitely the one by Roan Kattouw about writing MediaWiki extensions, which mentioned some things I did not know about yet (such as build in MediaWiki support for Memcached o_O), as well as provided a nice overview of the things you need to keep in mind. I wish I had seen it a year earlier though, as I would have learned a lot more from it then, and not made a lot of the noted beginner mistakes. In the next session I attended several strategy sessions, which gave me a nice idea of what all the strategy fuss is about. The last session I attended was about Wikimedia credibility, including a talk by Maarten about how information (esp the incorrect) spreads to other media. The other talks in this session where similar, and although obviously none of the issues addresses are technical in nature, I found several of them rather amusing.

It was great to meet all the people involved with SEMANTIC MediaWiki in person, as well as a bunch of people I only knew from IRC and other online communication tools. Sadly enough Yaron Koren and Brion Vibber and several other people I’d like to have seen there could not be at the event.

On the way back to Belgium I tackled a lot of small design issues that have been present in Maps and Semantic Maps for months, resulting in one big refactoring commit for each extension, which I made as soon as I was back home. After that I went to sleep, and woke up 19 hours later O_o

Next years Wikimania will be in Haifa, Israel. I’m probably going, but seriously hope it won’t be so insanely warm there

                          

After doing a pile of research on how to best create an extension management platform for MediaWiki as my Google Summer of Code project, I realized that a lot of the work that I wanted to do was already done in some form or another, and decided to somewhat augment my goals. Since I can build upon Configure, and the Deployment Framework of Ontoprise, it should now be possible to also take care of the MediaWiki and extension configuration that I put as optional in my original proposal. To have some transparency here, and not to cause misconceptions, I created an awesome new roadmap.

I did an attempt to get some feedback by posting my roadmap on wikitech-l, but apparently everyone is either happy with it, or more likely, Parkinson’s Law of Triviality is in play here. So feedback and suggestions are definitely welcome, you can post them on the discussion page.

As Configure is doing an awesome job already without making significant changes to any existing code, I decided to start off with the Deployment Framework. I’m currently in the process of figuring out how it works exactly, so I’m able to extend it’s features, and build a GUI in the form of several MediaWiki special pages on top of it. This will have some immediate pay-off as Ontoprise will be able to use this improved version directly.

Both my presentations for Wikimania 2010 have been accepted, of which one is about my project, which will give me a change to explain to people what I’m doing and why it’s so awesome

                          

I’ve been working on Maps and Semantic Maps 0.6, the next big, awesome, release of both MediaWiki extensions, for over a month now. I also released an early alpha on the 3th of April. All planned new features have been implemented, and known bugs from 0.5.x have been fixed. So you might wonder why 0.6 is still not out.

In response to the possibility of someone doing work on Maps and Semantic Maps during the upcoming Google Summer of Code, I took a critical look at the current structure, holding into account all the things I learned over the last two month while working on Storyboard. I came to the conclusion that a bunch of things ought to be handled in a cleaner fashion, and started to refactor this code. The most difficult part here is changing how the display_map and display_point(s) parser functions handle their mapping service parameter and validate the provided location(s). I’ve been wanting to change this since 0.4, but didn’t since it’s rather tricky to do. I decided to finally get this done now, and have done most of the work. To complete these changes, I’ll have to make some rather complex modifications to Validator, which can take a while to complete. That’s the last thing that needs to be done before the 0.6 release though

I estimate this should be done in approximately 2 weeks, maybe sooner. After that I’m planning to release at least one RC, to ensure stability and complete awesomeness, cause really a lot has been changed. I figure about three quarters of the codebase has been changed in one way or another!

After this release a lot of cool new features can be added, which I might do before the GSoC coding period starts. There are also a few people who wanted to do a mapping project for GSoC at the WMF, but did not get accepted, which are planning to do some effort here after all, which is totally awesome

                          

Like last year, I’ve been accepted for GSoC 2010 – yay!

The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is an annual program, first held from May to August 2005, in which Google  awards stipends  to hundreds of students who successfully complete a requested free software / open-source coding project during the summer.

My project is creating an awesome extension management platform for MediaWiki, facilitating the installation, updating, removal and configuration of extensions. I’ll get mentored by Brion Vibber, which is probably the best known MediaWiki developer there is. The underneath paragraphs are out-takes of my actual proposal.

Project summary

The goal of this project is to create an administration panel from where wiki administrators can update, install and remove extensions. A second goal would be to allow management of the installed extensions.

A panel where wiki administrators can install, update and remove extensions would have huge benefits. First of all, people would not have to manually download an extension and put an includes in LocalSettings, neither would they need to worry about compatibility and dependencies. Hitting an update button also takes considerably less time then doing the whole download routine again, and will cause people to run more up to date extensions. Another important advantage is that people will get extensions recommended, and can easily browse them. This way people will find extensions that do something they wanted but did not know about, and in general have extensions that better suit their needs. A third advantage is that extension developers won’t need to do extreme efforts to let people know there is a new version (and probably still only reach part of the relevant public). This is inspired on the way Word-press does things.

The second goal of this project is to add setting management for individual extensions. Currently extension settings are managed via LocalSettings. The aim here is to completely remove the need of editing any file directly by storing the configuration the the MediaWiki database, and creating a GUI to modify these settings. This would involve creating API modules so extensions can add and update their own settings. Work on this will only be started after the first goal is completed, and is seen as an “if time permits to-do”.

A third, also optional, goal would be to create a management interface for the wiki’s configuration itself. This is very similar to the second goal, and should be kept in mind while creating the management for extension settings. I do not expect to complete this to-do during GSoC, but want to provide the foundations for it, so this can be completed after the project itself is finished.

Deliverables

Note: the beneath list is a guideline only.

Things the administration panel should be capable of:

Required deliverables

• Automatic checking for extension updates (and updates to MW itself)

• Download and install option for extension updates

• Download and install option for extensions that have not yet been installed

• Removal of installed extensions

• Dependency and compatibility checking (both for installation, removal and updating)

• Extension browsing
  • Recommendation of similar extensions
  • Showing a list of most used and most recommended extensions
  • Finding extensions by category or keywords

• Enabling and disabling of installed extensions (so without removing them)

If time permits

• Management of settings specific to each extension.

• Management of MediaWiki configuration.

Project schedule

I’m for a loose schedule, since I believe this is the most efficient. I have no doubt that the to-do list will change a lot during the project, items will be changed, moved, multiple new ones will be added, and some might be removed. A fixes schedule would take away flexibility and stand in the way of efficiency. One of the main reasons to have a schedule is to ensure the student does not take the project to lightly, end ends up making insufficient progress. I like to believe I have clearly demonstrated that I will put considerable effort in such projects, even without any schedule, during last yeas GSoC, and with all the commits I’ve made since then.

This list contains some loose planning without any dates:

• Discuss the best way to structure the platform with mentor, and other relevant people.

• Investigate how similar functionality works with other software, and which aspects of these implementations can be used.

• Get the requited knowledge of MW to be able to create the platform in an efficient and modular fashion.

• Create the panel with the most basic features, then release and document it.

• Add the other features, possibly spread over several releases.

• (Start on the extension setting management functionality.)

• (Start on the MediaWiki configuration management functionality.)

• (Add other awesome things to the platform.)

• Take over the worlds and make everyone use this platform.

My current planning

I have to finish up the work I’m currently doing for the Wikimedia Foundation before I can fully start on this, and also like to release Maps and Semantic Maps 0.6 before then. This will probably be in two to tree weeks from now.

Also see the Wikimedia tech blog post which links to the other accepted projects.

                          

Yay! I finally got my Google Summer of Code T-shirt!

With my T-shirt, I also got my GSoC 2009 certificate, which marks the end of any involvement with GSoC for me (see original post). That is, until next year. When I reflect back to what I learned and achieved during GSoC, I’m more then happy with it. I’m planning to do another (awesome) Wikimedia Foundation project next year, if I manage to get accepted again. This (awesome) project will be more focused on changes to MW’s core, and so provide me with an (awesome) opportunity to learn more about the inner working of MW, which I’m currently still unfamiliar with. I’m not going to make my exact plans public yet, cause it’s possible the things I want to improve will already be taken care off, and I don’t want everyone to go rip-off my idea I’ve already put my name on the (awesome) participants list for MW, and was FIRST (awesome!) since I created the (awesome) page.

                          

Me and two fellow Google Summer of Code students, one from the Netherlands, and one from Belgium, have decided to hold a meeting in Brussels. This will be a great opportunity to discuss each others work, and future plans.

There are over 10 other Dutch speaking GSoC students we haven’t heard of, they are of course also welcome. I’d also like to invite people who are interested in GSoC. This includes people who are simply curious and want to know what it is, but also those who are considering to participate as either student or mentor in a future GSoC. Note that non Ducth people are also welcome! Feel free to send me an email, or one on the GSoC student list, if you are interested, or simply comment on this blog post.

The meeting will take place September 29th, at 19:30, in Hacker Space Brussels (HSB). HSB is located at PRINSES ELISABETHLAAN 46, 1030 Schaarbeek, Brussels.

                          

Today I finally announced the new releases of my extensions on a few wiki mailing lists. I also gave the Semantic Maps documentation another overhaul, and created a manual on how to extend maps.

This manual targets developers who want to add support for a mapping service to one of the features Maps and Semantic Maps support: parser functions, query printers and form inputs. I still have to create the manual for the later two features though. Currently, the subjects of adding a new mapping service, adding parser function support and creating new geocoder classes are covered.

I hope to get the Semantic Maps part done by tomorrow, as a nice conclusion to my GSoC project.