Mon blog personnel passe sur Pictural .

A bientôt, là-bas ...

I have now moved the technology oriented topics of this blog to Process-one.
The new content is available from my Process-one Blog Page.

See you there !

I came across an interesting blog post explaining how to compile wxErlang: How to compile wxErlang on Linux.

wxErlang is an interesting initiative, as it could end up providing a very nice multi-platform graphical toolkit for Erlang. wxErlang is based on wxWindows.

The project has not been updated for a while and it would be very nice to see new contributions to it.

As an incentive, we have added the project to Process-one Erlang forge.

Ideally, this is the kind of graphical toolkit that could replace GS (based on TCL/TK) in the standard Erlang distribution. I think a new graphical framework can only take off if integrated in Erlang/OTP. This is the only way to make the developer sure that their graphical program will be usable on any Erlang installation.

From an Erlang developer point of view, the wxErlang code is also a very nice example on how to interface Erlang with C++ libraries.

Three years ago, I had started developing a code browsing tool. The main idea was to have a simple and easy way to follow what was happening in public Erlang developments, directly from the CVS repository of the projects (At this time Subversion was still not stable).

This tool was called Metafrog and was hosted on Erlang-projects website.

The work was huge and I had not enough time to make Metafrog stable enough, so I stopped the project. The SVN support was also missing and it needed more work to make it usefull with the new types of repositories.

Recently, I have discovered that a company called Cenqua has made exactly what I had in mind, in a product called Fisheye (Actually they do not yet do everything I had in mind but are working on Crucible to complete the features set with code review, comments and annotations).

This is a tool we needed for the various internal projects we are working on.

As a follow-up to the Metafrog project, we decided to offer to host Erlang Open Source project on our forge platform, as a service for the Erlang community. The hosting does not imply changing the projects approach or method. The repository can be kept where he is, but we simply offer repository browsing and analysis.

The forge is available on https://forge.process-one.net/

We are now providing feedback on the following Erlang projects:
- ErlIDE
- Jabberlang
- Jungerl
- ejabberd
- Tsung
- Wings3D
- Yaws

(Follow the links to start browsing the code).

Please, drop me a mail if you know other Erlang projects that should be hosted on our forge.

I have been mentoring a student for the Google Summer of Code on the topic of Realtime Wikis.

The original idea was to create a proof of concept of a Wiki providing a realtime updates and propagation of the changes to the users currently viewing the page. With this kind of application, you end up with a Wiki that can act as a sort of collaborative whiteboard.

The prototype uses ejabberd publish and subscribe integrated module. Each Wiki page is mapped to an ejabberd pubsub node. ejabberd pubsub node being hierarchical, this maps easily to a website organisation. Each user currently viewing the page is subscribed to the corresponding Wiki node and received the changes to the page as they are made.

The project has been proposed and written by Grzegorz Grasza.

A demo site is available on the Realtime wiki demo page. Playing a bit with it can help understanding the underlying concepts.

The "Realtime wiki" project report is available from Jabber.org wiki (sorry, not realtime yet ;-).

We hope to have time in the future to contribute to this code, by making it more userfriendly for the end user. However, it is still a good validation of the idea.

Your feedback and ideas are of course welcome.