Almost everything is in the title: we'll hold a CubicWeb sprint in our Paris office after the first French Semantic Web conference, so on 19, 20 and 21 of january 2011.

The main topic will be to enhance newcomers experience in installing and using CubicWeb.

If you wish to come, you're welcome, that's a great way to meet us, learn the framework and share thoughts about it. Simply contact us so we can check there is still some room available.

photo by Sebastian Mary under creative commons licence.

While at Paris Web 2010 we were all impressed by the presentation and demos by Paul Rouget on HTML5 (tech evangelist must be a hard job!). Here is my take and a few URLs on the things that were presented.

• Websockets with persistent connections between the server and the browser. That way you can avoid pulling information every 5 seconds, the server can tell the web page a new info is available. The immediate uses we have for this are :
  • realtime feed display
  • jabber web chat rooms
  • in cubicweb's forge : new comment indication on a ticket
  • in cubicweb in general : notification that the edited element has been openned by another user (instead of a lock mechanism)
  • real time collaborative editing (etherpad style functionality)
• File upload demo : http://demos.hacks.mozilla.org/openweb/uploadingFiles/
• File EXIF extraction, client side resize or geolocalisation http://demos.hacks.mozilla.org/openweb/FileAPI/ . That could be very cool for things such as resizing an image before it is sent to the server (you know, for your mother who doesn't know how to resize that 2 Mbytes photo before sending it to the site). Reference : https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Using_files_from_web_applications
• Using File IO, you can do some heavy Drag'n'drop from your computer to your browser directly in the browser (yes, you can get rid of that nasty java applet). Apparently Google implemented in Chromium a non-standard drag'n'drop the other way around : from the web app to your desktop, which could be cool as well.

• XHR - XMLHttpRequest. Usually this type of requests is not possible cross-domain. Now they will be (with an authorization mechanism). That way, you will be able to post and control websites from the page in your browser.
• Audio Data API : you can now access & modify audio files directly in your browser (before uploading them server side). This makes me think of the first time I realized people where implementing traditionally "heavy" applications (photo editing, music editing, even movie edition) in web applications. I was (and still am) very surprised and skeptic, but this kind of evolution makes me believe that there can be a day when you don't even need to send massive files to the server to edit them.

Admittedly, you probably need to see the thrilling presentation and demos to be tempted to go and dip into these technologies. Reading the documentation will probably not encourage you to go and code some cool new features.

One of the things that the audience commented about at the end of the presentation is that there was still a huge lack of "authoring tools" for HTML5. For some coders that never leave vim or emacs, this is heresy, but we have to admit that the adoption of flash and silverlight (apparently) is very much driven by simple click'n'program tools.

During the presentation, I used a Chrome 6 that I had lying around on my Ubuntu, but by the end of the presentation I had installed Firefox4 using the mozilla PPA

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -uVf install firefox-4.0

The PPA version keeps config files separate so you can easily switch between your "standard" Firefox3 profile and the cutting edge Firefox4 (obviously the big downside is not having all your cool extensions).

The only thing missing from the presentation was the code... a request I hope Paul will grant to the community (a bunch of tweets about that followed the presentation).

The 3.10 development started during August, with two important patches: one on the repository / entity API, another one on the boxes / content navigation components unification (more on this later). Then it somewhat came to a halt, as more work was done on other projects and to stabilize the 3.9 branch. We finally got back on it during September, adding several other major changes or enhancements.

• Cleanup of the repository side entity API, i.e. the API you may use when writing hooks. Beside simple namespace cleanup (a few renamings), the API has been modified to move out attributes being edited from the read cache. So now:

  • entities do not inherit from dict anymore; access to the dict protocol on an entity will raise deprecation warnings
  • the attributes cache is now a cw_attr_cache dictionary on the entity
  • edited attributes are in a cw_edited attribute special object, which is only available in hooks for a modified entity (i.e. '[before|after]_[add|update]_entity', you should use the dict protocol on that object to get modified attributes or to modify what is edited (in 'before' hooks only, and this is now enforced). This deprecates the former edited_attributes attribute.

• Unification of 'boxes' / 'contentnavigation' registries and base classes, into "contextual components" stored in the 'ctxcomponents' registry. This implied the introduction of "layout" objects which are appobjects responsible of displaying the components according to the context they are displayed in.

  This separation of content / layout and some css cleanups allows us to move former boxes and content components into each other's place in the user interface: for instance, go to your preferences pages and try to move the search box. You now have many more different locations available. Though one component may not go anywhere, so forthcoming releases should tweak this to avoid proposing dumb choices. But the hot stuff is there!

  Also, a cache has been set on the registry to avoid recomputing possible components for each context (place in the ui).

• Upgraded jQuery and jQuery UI respectively to version 1.4.2 and 1.8. Removed jquery.autocomplete.js since jQuery UI provides its own autocomplete plugin. A cwautocomplete plugin was added in order to keep widgets as backward compatible as possible. If you used custom autocomplete feature, you should take a look at this guide.

• The RelationFacet base class now automatically proposes to search for entities without the relation if this is allowed by the schema and if there are some in current results. Example: search for tickets which are not planned in a version.

• Data sources have been modeled as CubicWeb entity type CWSource. The 'sources' file is still there but will now only contains definition of the system source, as well as default manager account login and password. This implied changes in instance initialization commands, introduction of a new 'add-source' command to cubicweb-ctl, as well as change in the repository startup. Also, on a multi-sources instance, we can now search using a facet on the cw_source relation (a new mandatory metadata relation on each entities) to filter according to the data source entities are coming from.

• Although introduced during 3.9 releases, it's worth mentioning the new support for multi-columns unicity constraint through yams's __unique_together__ entity type attribute, allowing for unicity constraint enforced by the underlying database instead of CubicWeb hooks. This is limited and doesn't work in every configuration, but is a must have when running several distributed CubicWeb instance of the same application (hence database).

Also as usual, the 3.10 includes a bunch of other minor enhancements, refactorings and bug fixes. Every introduced change should be backward compatible, except probably some minor ui details due to the css box simplification. That's it.

So please download and install CubicWeb 3.10 and report us any problem on the mailing-list!

Enjoy!

For the "Journées Du Logiciel Libre (JDLL)" in Lyon which will take place the 14th, 15th et 16th of octobre 2010, we will be presenting the semantic side of CubicWeb on Friday 15th. There will be a talk and a tutorial. Details can be found here and there.

If you're around, come and see us!

We recently discovered that the cubicweb.org site (the one you are probably visiting right now) was suffering from a memory leak. The munin graphs showed a memory consumption steadily increasing soon after the instance was started, and this would only stop when all the memory on the host was exhausted. This was clearly caused by a memory leak somewhere, either in CubicWeb itself or in a cube used by the instance.

Fig. 1: Munin graphs showing the memory leak in cubicweb.org

Notice the associated service downtimes, and the stabilized memory consumption on Sept 23, after the leak was fixed.

Since Python has a garbage collector, either the leak was occuring in a C extension, or it was caused by some objects which were not garbage collectable. A common cause for the latter, as explained in the gc module documentation, are objects with a __del__ method which are part of a cycle.

We used the "gc" view, which is an administrative view in CubicWeb, reachable by appending "?vid=gc" at the end of the url of the root of your instance, if you are a member of the managers group. This view uses the gc module from the python standard library to see which objects are not garbage collected.

This view showed thousands of instances of mercurial.url.httphandler. This class indeed has a __del__ method and instances have a cycle with urllib2.OpenerDirector. Mercurial is used by the vcsfile cube which regularly polls remote repository over HTTP, which causes httphandler to be instantiated (and a reference to be leaked). This problem had gone undetected in mercurial because most of the time, processes using mercurial over http are shortlived and the leaked memory is quickly collected by the operating system. Discussion ensued on the IRC forum #mercurial with the developers and a patch was submitted which fixes the leak. In order to avoid the problem with versions of mercurial up to the current one, a new version of vcsfile including a monkey patch for mercurial was released and deployed on cubicweb.org!

For that last sprint day, each team made some nice achievements:

• Steph & Alain worked on the mv/cp actions implementation to makes them working properly and supporting globs. Last but not least, with a full set of tests.
• Alex & Charles got back what we call apycot 'full' tests, eg running test with coverage enabled, checking that code coverage is greater than a given threshold, but also running pylint and checking that its global evaluation is at least 7 (configurable, of course).
• Katia & Aurélien provided a sharp implementation of recipe checking, so that we know we don't launch a recipe badly constructed, as well as informing the user nicely from what errors his recipe suffer.
• Julien managed to set up a recipe managing from Debian package construction to Debian repository publication, going through lintian on the way
• Pierre-Yves helped other teams to solve the narval related bugs they encountered, and finished by writing a thread-safe implementation of apycot's writer so we can run several checker simultaneously.
• Celso continued working on a proof of concept blue-theme cube, wondering how to make CubicWeb looks nicer and be easily customisable in future versions.
• Sylvain helped there and there and integrated patches...

So we finally didn't get up to the demo. But we now have everything to set it up, so I've a good hope that we will have a beta version of our brand new production chain up and running before the end of August!

Thanks to everyone for all this good work, and for this time spent all together!

Following the presentation of CubicWeb at OSCON 2010 in July, the editor of SemanticWeb.com wrote an article describing the CubicWeb framwork. Read the article and ask your questions on the mailing list!

In this fourth day of the our Summer Sprint important progress have been made.

• Stéphanie and Alain cleaned up the Apycot's bot sources from deprecated code and rewrite part of the test suite to follow the new way to launch apycot. They cleaned up the handling of VCS sources for tested project taking advantages of the new mercurial cache for vcsfile implemented by Katia and Aurélien last Tuesday. This feature keep a local clone of the remote repository and allow much faster checkout during test runs.
• Julien made significant progress in the writing of the Debian recipe. A recipes can now successfully build Debian packages of a project and validate them with lintian and lgp. He later paired with Pierre-Yves and they improved the annotation of Apycot's Narval variable to enhance Input validation in Apycot's Narval recipes. For example, the action building a Debian package will explicitly refuse to run on a project not yet checked-out.
• Aurelien first paired with Pierre-Yves to improve some views and the consistency of the database schema, then he worked on a dashboard displaying various indicators useful to the version publishing process.
• Pierre-Yves spent some time improving the ability of Narval to recover on errors and to display meaningful logs about them.
• Alexandre and Charles finished the re-implementation of the full python recipe.They used options at the Narval level to run test suite with the coverage enabled and re-enabled the coverage checker to process the result, discovering some problems in Narval's engine on the way...
• Celso finished Spanish translation of Cubicweb's core and started to work on a new css theme
• Sylvain helped several groups along the day and reviewed patches from them.

CubicWeb/Narval Sprint is going on !

The third day of our sprint focused on the following points:

• Pierre-Yves worked to prevent duplicate test executions (eg running several time the same test with the same version configuration),
• Celso has terminated the spanish translation of CubicWeb. He's now working on various cubes translation,
• Stéphanie and Alain spent some time on the narval bot view. They also modified ProjectEnvironement's attributes in order to use similar information available on the vcsfile repository, hence simplifying the configuration (more to do on this!),
• Julien worked on the debian package recipe,
• Katia and Aurélien worked on recipe security (using CWPermission),
• Alexandre and Charles produced a first template of a full test recipe using pyunit and pycoverage,
• Finally, our captain, Sylvain, is at the helm !

We'll hopefuly be able to present a functionnal demo at the end of the week.

Narval/Cubicweb left off !

During the second day of our Summer CubicWeb/Narval Sprint, several tasks started on the first day were completed and new tasks started:

• Charles, Alexandre and Julien finished writing the "copy" and "move" Narval actions, and then started transforming existing apycot checkers into Narval actions.
• Pierre-Yves managed to improve Narval reports with more explicit and relevant content.
• Stéphanie and Alain finished the bot status view as well as the recipe graph view.
• Katia and Aurélien finished writing the new mercurial cache solution for vcsfile and started improving the security of Narval recipes (i.e. who can start which recipe).
• Celso kept on his life-long work of translating CubicWeb to Spanish.
• Sylvain wrote some Narval views, improved Narval execution logs handling and kept on reviewing patches and helping various people...