FOSDEM 2015 Desktops DevRoom Call for Talks

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FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels (Belgium). One of the tracks will be the Desktops DevRoom (formerly known as “CrossDesktop DevRoom”), which will host Desktop-related talks.

We are now inviting proposals for talks about Free/Libre/Open-source Software on the topics of Desktop development, Desktop applications and interoperability amongst Desktop Environments. This is a unique opportunity to show novel ideas and developments to a wide technical audience.

Topics accepted include, but are not limited to: Enlightenment, Gnome, KDE, Unity, XFCE, LXQt, Windows, Mac OS X, software development for the desktop, general desktop matters, applications that enhance desktops and web (when related to desktop).

Talks can be very specific, such as the advantages/disadvantages of development with Qt on Wayland over X11/Mir; or as general as predictions for the fusion of Desktop and web in 5 years time. Topics that are of interest to the users and developers of all desktop environments are especially welcome. The FOSDEM 2014 schedule might give you some inspiration.

Please include the following information when submitting a proposal:

  • Your name
  • The title of your talk (please be descriptive, as titles will be listed with around 250 from other projects)
  • Short abstract of one or two paragraphs
  • Short bio (with photo)
  • Requested time: from 15 to 45 minutes. Normal duration is 30 minutes. Longer duration requests must be properly justified. You may be assigned LESS time than you request.

The deadline for submissions is December 7th 2014. FOSDEM will be held on the weekend of January 31st-February 1st 2015 and the Desktops DevRoom will take place on Sunday, February 1st 2015. Please use the following website to submit your proposals: https://penta.fosdem.org/submission/FOSDEM15 (you do not need to create a new Pentabarf account if you already have one from past years).

You can also join the devroom’s mailing list, which is the official communication channel for the DevRoom: desktops-devroom@lists.fosdem.org (subscription page for the mailing list)

– The Desktops DevRoom 2015 Organization Team

FOSDEM CrossDesktop DevRoom 2013 – Call for Talks

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FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels (Belgium). One of the tracks will be the CrossDesktop  DevRoom, which will host Desktop-related talks.

We are now inviting proposals for talks about Free/Libre/Open-source Software on the topics of Desktop development, Desktop applications and interoperativity amongst Desktop Environments. This is a unique opportunity to show novel ideas and developments to a wide technical audience.

Topics accepted include, but are not limited to: Enlightenment, Gnome, KDE, Unity, XFCE, Windows, Mac OS X, general desktop matters, applications that enhance desktops and web (when related to desktop).

Talks can be very specific, such as developing mobile applications with Qt Quick; or as general as predictions for the fusion of Desktop and web in 5 years time. Topics that are of interest to the users and developers of all desktop environments are especially welcome. The FOSDEM 2012 schedule might give you some inspiration:
https://archive.fosdem.org/2012/schedule/track/crossdesktop_devroom.html

Please include the following information when submitting a proposal:

  • Your name
  • The title of your talk (please be descriptive, as titles will be listed with around 250 from other projects)
  • Short abstract of one or two paragraphs
  • Short bio
  • Requested time: from 15 to 45 minutes. Normal duration is 30 minutes. Longer duration requests must be properly justified.

The deadline for submissions is December 14th 2012. FOSDEM will be held on the weekend of 2-3 February 2013. Please submit your proposals to crossdesktop-devroom@lists.fosdem.org (subscribtion page for the mailing list: https://lists.fosdem.org/listinfo/crossdesktop-devroom )

— The CrossDesktop DevRoom 2013 Organization Team

PS: Qt and KDE people are starting to organize for the booth, devroom, Saturday & Sunday night, etc. If you want to help, join kde-promo and add yourself to the wiki.

 

On HTML5 and native

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A few months ago I wrote on my disbelief of HTML5 being the right tool for everything . Some people took that as me saying HTML5 is useless.

That’s obviously not true and it’s certainly not what I think.

It’s my opinion there is room for HTML5 and there is room for native applications and the decision on what to use should not be taken lightly.

Here are a few questions that may help you to make a wise decision.

 

Target user

Is it corporate? Is it consumer?

Corporate devices are usually under control and users may not be able to install software.

Or traffic may be filtered and users cannot browse to your website to use your webapp and getting the authorization will take months, therefore they give up before they have even started using it.

Or they may be on a slow Internet connection and using that HTML5 webapp that took years to develop and add all those nice effects is hardly possible due to megabytes of JavaScript and images needing to be downloaded.

As for consumers, despite having full control of their systems, it’s not roses either: not all consumers know how to install software and/or they may be scared by UAC dialogs (hint: always sign your software with a certificate whose signature chain reaches VeriSign).

 

Target device

Is it a computer? Smartphone? Tablet? Web browser?

If a computer, is it a PC running Windows? Linux? Mac? All of them? Are you trying to reach as many platforms as possible?

How old of a computer are you targeting? Pentium 4? Core 2 Duo? Core i5? How much RAM? Try a fancy website with a lot of HTML5 niftiness on an old computer and you’ll probably be surprised at how slow HTML5 can be, even on modern browsers.

 

Deployment

Deploying native applications in corporate environments is a bit of a nightmare due to different operating system versions, hardware, etc

Deploying native applications in consumer computers is only a problem if you are targeting low-skilled users.

HTML5 is easy to deploy, provided that you can get the user to use a proper version of the browser. This is workable with consumers but often impossible with corporate, so if you go for HTML5 for a corporate application, make sure you support everything from at least down to Internet Explorer 8.

For mobile devices (smartphones and tablets), it doesn’t really matter whether it’s an HTML5 or native application: it has to be installed on the device, the device goes with the user everywhere and when the user moves to another device, re-installing all the applications is a matter of accessing the Apple Store, Android Market or equivalent and say “download it all”.

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HTML5 for everything?

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Apparently HTML5 applications are the best thing after sliced bread.

HTML5 is the first platform any mobile vendor supports: iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Symbian. All of them.

Windows 8 is said to promote HTML5 as the preferred application development solution.

I used to look kindly at that. But about a month ago I started to get worried: is HTML5 good for everything?

Long-lived applications

In military, industrial, warehouse management, medical, etc is not rare that bespoke applications are developed and stay in use for many years (and I really mean many: 10, 20 or even more!) with barely an update. It’s not rare that those applications only receive very small updates once very 5 years. Those applications, not Angry Birds, are what keeps the world running: troops know what supplies they can count on, iPhones are manufactured, FedEx is able to deliver your package and your doctor is able to check your health.

But now that everybody seems to be moving to HTML5 webapps, what happens when my warehouse management application is a webapp and the additions in the newest browsers make the webapp no longer work?

Are vain upgrades the future?

Say my webapp is released in 2014 and it works fine with Firefox 14.0 and Chrome 26.0, the newest browsers when I release the application in 2014. Fast-forward to 2020 and Firefox 14.0 and Chrome 26.0 do not even install on Windows 10 computer! What’s the solution?

Should the customer pay for a huge update and redesign to make it work with Firefox 27.1 and Chrome 41.0 in 2020?

A virtual machine with Windows 8 and Firefox 14.0? A portable Mozilla Firefox 14.0 on Windows 10 in 2020 to be able to use that line-of-business application that only requires a small update once or twice every 5 years? How are the virtual machine and/or Portable Firefox 14.0 different from or better than a fat client? What’s the advantage? I’d say none!

Native applications usually do not have that kind of problems because APIs are much more stable. You can still run Win16 applications on Windows 7!

You don’t believe me? We may soon be developing for 76 browsers!

While HTML5 may be fine for applications which are updated very often, it makes me feel very uneasy to see it used in environments where applications will be rarely updated, such as SCADAs, warehouse management, control system, medical records, etc.

A solution is needed

It looks like that choice of technology is going to make those applications much more expensive in the medium and long term, paying for “adaptations to new browsers” (sorry, I resist to call “update” or “upgrade” to something that adds zero value other than being able to run on a newer browser).

Or maybe it’s about time to define actual “HTML5 profiles”. ACID3 seems to be too weak of a profile: two very different browsers may pass ACID3 yet a webapp would work with one browser and fail with the other due to bugs, missing features/added features, etc.

Something needs to be done.

Reminder: FOSDEM 2012 CrossDesktop DevRoom Call for Talks

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FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels (Belgium). One of the developer rooms will be the CrossDesktop DevRoom, which will host Desktop-related talks.

Are you interested in giving a talk about open source and Qt, KDE, Enlightenment, Gnome, XFCE, Windows, Mac OS X, general desktop matters, mobile development, applications that enhance desktops and/or web?

Hurry up and submit your proposal, deadline is December 20th!

There is more information in the Call for Talks we published one month ago.

If you are interested in Qt/KDE, come visit us at the KDE booth. If you add yourself to the KDE FOSDEM 2012 wiki page, we will be able to better organize the usual dinner on Sunday and/or smaller meetings for “special interest groups”.

 

FOSDEM 2012 – CrossDesktop DevRoom Call for Talks

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FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels (Belgium). One of the developer rooms will be the CrossDesktop DevRoom, which will host Desktop-related talks.

We are now inviting proposals for talks about Free/Libre/Open-source Software on the topics of Desktop development, Desktop applications and interoperativity amongst Desktop Environments. This is a unique opportunity to show novel ideas and developments to a wide technical audience.

Topics accepted include, but are not limited to: Enlightenment, Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Windows, Mac OS X, general desktop matters, applications that enhance desktops and web (when related to desktop).

Talks can be very specific, such as developing mobile applications with Qt Quick; or as general as predictions for the fusion of Desktop and web in 5 years time. Topics that are of interest to the users and developers of all desktop environments are especially welcome. The FOSDEM 2011 schedule might give you some inspiration.

Please include the following information when submitting a proposal: your name, the title of your talk (please be descriptive, as titles will be listed with around 250 from other projects) and a short abstract of one or two paragraphs.

The deadline for submissions is December 20th 2011. FOSDEM will be held on the weekend of 4-5 February 2012. Please submit your proposals to crossdesktop-devroom@lists.fosdem.org

Also, if you are attending FOSDEM 2012, please add yourself to the KDE community wiki page so that we organize better. We need volunteers for the booth!

 

A wish a day 8: Wt Creator

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April Fools’ passed, it’s safe to blog again 🙂

My last wish was born when Koen Deforche (one of the best software developers I know) made an innocent comment at my talk at FOSDEM talk this year.

Koen happens to be the guy who created Wt (pronounced ‘witty’), a C++ library and application server for developing and deploying web applications. The API mimics Qt‘s: it is widget-centric and offers complete abstraction of any web-specific application details. Where Qt has QObject, Wt has WObject; where Qt has QPainter, Wt has WPainter; both provide a very similar Model-View architecture, both have signals and slots (Wt’s being based on Boost), both provide an OpenGL widget (WebGL in the case of Wt), both allow for language translations, and in fact you can combine Qt and Wt code thanks to the wtwithqt bridge.

If you know me, you know I love Wt. Developing webapps like they were desktop apps (thinking of “widgets” instead of “pages”) is very powerful. In fact, I gave up on Rails after I discovered Wt because Rails has become a spaghetti of Ruby, Javascript, CSS, HTML and whatnot, with so many conventions that make it very difficult to follow the code unless you know very well every library involved (not to speak of performance and memory consumption, where Wt beats everything).

Wt is not without its problems, though. In my opinion, the main needs of Wt are more widgets and an IDE. Today I’m going to talk about the IDE.

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Applied for Debian Maintainer, FLOSS workflow works

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I have been packaging for Debian for a few years now. My first “serious” package was Wt back in 2007, but I had been backporting for Ubuntu for at least 2 years already, which means I have been doing .deb packaging for about 5 years (!).

Last week I decided it was about time stop nagging my sponsors (Vincent Bernat, Thomas Girard and Sune Vuorela) every time I wanted to update the packages I maintain (witty, ace and libmsn), and I finally started the Debian New Maintainer process.

The main reason I had not applied for Debian Maintainer yet was it requires some bureaucracy and, well, I’d rather spend my time coding or packaging than doing paperwork 🙂

I sent my Declaration of Intent and soon after, Thomas and Vincent replied and supported my application with very very nice and kind words. Thank you, guys! I’m flattered! 🙄

Had I known I would be buttered up so much, I would have certainly applied a long time ago! 😀

But you know what is the best part of this? It shows how open source projects take advantage of all the tools and communications channels we have (IRC, mailing lists, sprints, conferences, etc), and make distributed development work very well: here we have a 900-developers project in which two French guys are praising an Spanish guy they have never, ever met face-to-face (only e-mail, occasional IRC, and the most important of all: code review). Meritocracy at its full extent. Have you ever seen that in a traditional 100,000 workers company with hundreds of developers working in a single project?

Bootstrap your CMake project

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When I talk to people about the CMake build system, they like the fact that it generates native project files for the tools you already use (which makes possible to use distributed compiling, debugging, etc). Next to that, Visual Studio and autotools users complain about bootstrapping not being possible.

If you are using Visual C++, solutions probably work fine for you and it is a fact they work out of the box with VC++. However, do not even try to move to another platform (Linux, Mac…) or another compiler on Windows because it will not work.

If you use autotools, you generate the configure script on your development machine and your users just run it to prepare makefiles. Only a Bourne-compatible shell is required when trying to build. Moving to Windows, particularly Visual C++ will be quite hard.

CMake is in my opinion one of the best build-systems out there but there is one problem: you need to have CMake in order to build a CMake-based project.

Now add third-party dependencies, which probably use a different build-system, to the mix and suddenly building your software has become time-consuming and complex. In terms of money, that translates to lost revenue because there is a high probability people evaluating your software will give up before they even have something to test.

Nokia solves this by distributing Qt binaries for the most popular compilers (MSVC2005, MSVC2008, MinGW). But there is always someone using a different compiler: MSVC2010, a different flavor of MinGW, Embarcadero C++ Builder…

KDE on Windows solves this by having its own “meta-buildsystem” called emerge, which is written in Python, which adds a dependency on Python when you want to build.

Can’t we do better? Can we get all the advantages of CMake yet not depend on CMake being available?

Yes, we can. I tried to do that for Wt and implemented it in the form of winstng. It’s a small batch file for Windows and a Bash shell script (for Unix; I didn’t manage to remove one bashism) which automagically download, build (if needed) and install CMake, all the third-party dependencies, build them, and then download Wt and install it. Everything ends up in a self-contained location which you can move around*. And you do not need administrator permissions. Tested on Windows, Linux and Mac.

*For now that’s only true on Windows, on Unix platforms I have not removed the rpath for some libraries which use build systems other than CMake (namely, OpenSSL).

BTW, if you are at FOSDEM, there is a Wt talk on Sunday, 14.30-15.15: The next desktop is the browser.

Wt PPA: end of support for Ubuntu Jaunty

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Ubuntu Jaunty reached end of support life last October and apparently packages have been removed from Launchpad PPAs too.

Given that it is impossible for me to build binary packages for Jaunty in the Wt PPA due to missing packages, the Wt PPA will no longer provide new packages for Ubuntu Jaunty. The last stable version of Wt for Jaunty is 3.1.6.

On April 2011, Karmic reaches end of support, and Hardy reaches end of support for desktop (support for servers will be available until April 2013). I will provide Wt packages for those distributions while Launchpad supports them.

Packages for 3.1.7a are already available for Ubuntu Maverick, Lucid and Karmic, as usual. Packages for Debian Lenny (in the Wt OBS repository) and Ubuntu Hardy packages will be ready in a few hours. Source packages for Debian Sid are available from mentors.