SàT progress note 2019-W20

goffi il y a 5 ans jabber-xmpp-en SàT project libre SàT progress

Little progress during this week, I've had a busy week-end far from computer (and it's a relief from time to time to be freed from screen).

I'm working mainly on the new website, so I'll explain a bit why doing a new website.

When you have a project, the website is the place people go to know what it is, and SàT is a quite difficult project to explain because it's doing a lot of things, and people get lost easily with it. We are now using the term "communication ecosystem" to explain it, as it seems to fit well: a generic tool for most of your communication needs (chat, file sharing, blog, events, etc.).

We have done current website a while ago using Django, which is one of the most popular web framework on Python (and even outside Python). Django is a great piece of software and has a huge community, but working on the official website with it means that we have to learn, maintain and follow extra technologies. Note that I'm using "we" because we are several people at the association, but I'm currently the only active developer and any extra amount of work is hard to take.

On the other hand, 0.7 version of SàT brings a web framework, based on the ecosystem and so on XMPP. That has many advantage: notably there is nothing new to learn and follow, and it's a concrete use case which allow to test and improve the ecosystem.
Furthermore, the XMPP integration allows to integrate effortlessly things like the official blog, while in the former version we had to include a page of Libervia in a <iframe>.

To summarize, moving the official website on Libervia web framework make the task more easy and is an occasion to test and improve the whole ecosystem.

One of the things that has been improved in the last few months is the integration of a task system, i.e. a way to launch piece of code on certain conditions (in particular if some files are changed), something similar to what you would have with Grunt, for instance, in Javascript world.
This is used to generate SàT documentation, using Sphinx to create HTML page from reStructuredText: when Libervia is launched with --dev-mode, each time the doc is modified, the HTML pages are rebuilt, really handy to check quickly that the syntax gives what you're expecting.

The new official website will be simple, with only a small page of presentation of the software, the documentation, social contract, and few extra pages. Most of it is done, and now I'm porting some pages from Django (the template system is similar to Jinja2 that we use, but it still needs adaptations, and the CSS classes are not the same).

During this, I'm also fixing bugs when I see them or somebody reports them. For instance, I've fixed this week a bug with registration on https://www.libervia.org. If you test any part of the ecosystem (being it desktop or mobile with Cagou, web with Libervia, TUI with Primitivus or CLI with jp), please give feedback either on our chat room (web), or via the SàT/XMPP based ticket system at https://bugs.goffi.org.

I was going to explain some changes I need to do on SàT Pubsub but this post is already long enough, I guess I'll keep it for next week (wow, teasing!).

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edhelas il y a 5 ans