dw_dev | GSoC2010 : Desktop Client

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Current Location: Allahabad, India

Entry tags:

summer of code

GSoC2010 : Desktop Client

hi,

I am Mrigesh, a Information Technology student from IIIT-Allahabad India and would like to work on the project developing desktop client for Dreamwidth.

Since past one or two weeks i have been studying the protocols which have been forked from LiveJournal (http://www.livejournal.com/doc/server/ljp.csp.protocol.html)and(http://hg.dwscoalition.org/dw-free/file/tip/cgi-bin/ljprotocol.pl) and the existing client for livejournal "logjam" . I have gained some understanding of the code and the client/server protocol reference specified above.

I would like to start with a bottom-up approach for the gui client, centring it along the linux OS specifically Ubuntu, using QT. I would start off with creating a client in following manner :

Creating a bare minimum client:
1. The client would request the user for authentication(username and password)
2. The client would allow the user to "read" past entries and "post" a new entry after successful authentication.
3. The methods used would be (Flat client/server protocol : http://www.livejournal.com/doc/server/ljp.csp.flat.protocol.html)
  1. login : logging into the client after successful authentication
  2. sessiongenerate : generating a session after successful login
  3. postevent : posting a blog/journal only if the login and sessiongenerate are both successful.
  4. sessionexpire : close the session instance the user has created thus.
Client with functionalities like reading and editing past posts, check friend list/groups and edit friend list/groups
1. The client would perform bare minimum functions as defined above
2. The user would be able to view his past posts and edit them.
3. The client would have a side pane/scrollbox where he would be able to view and edit his existing friends and groups
4. The new methods implemented would be :
  1. login : logging into the client after successful authentication.
  2. sessiongenerate : generating a session after successful login.
  3. postevent : posting a blog/journal only if the login and sessiongenerate are both successful.
  4. getevents : coupled with "syncitems" this would allow the user to view his past posts, events, to-do items.
  5. editevent : this would allow the user to edit/delete past posts in his journal.
  6. getfriends : this would fetch the list of users the current logged in user identifies as friends and displays them in the side pane/scrollbox.
  7. getfriendgroups : fetch the user defined groups of friends.
  8. editfriends : add/edit/delete existing friends.
  9. editfriendgroups : edit user defined friend group list.
This would be supposedly the final client(that what i planned till now anyways) with proxy support(i dont know how to do that but i am still reading a blog about it) and most of the required functionalities provided in the protocol.

I would be following the ABC rule of software development, i am recently messing with twitter api (using curl) and have been successful till date while posting a tweet and a mention/reply. I would to integrate twitter functionalities as well , but that seems a bit far-fetched. I would also be honoured to work with/on dreamwidth even after GSOC2010 as i find it could help me learn a lot of new things!!

Any sort of suggestions or critic comments are most welcome, after-all it would only help me in improving my proposal :) .

Thank You
Regards
Mrigesh Pokhrel
irc : _silentAssassin
gtalk : mrigeshpokhrel
skype : mrigeshpokhrel
(PS: i am in india and so i would be available anytime after 12:00 GMT ( thats when my class gets over))

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Welcome to Dreamwidth! It looks like you've done a good bit of research already, which is great. Have you looked at the two existing Dreamwidth clients (

qtxpost and eXpostulate)? It may be that you can work with the open source bits of their code to save repeating work, and then expand from there.

yes ... tony's post was just beneath mine .. so it wasn't hard to look for it.

Hello from another Linux/Qt fan! :)

I'm curious why do you prefer a flat interface? IMHO, XML-RPC is a lot more convenient. Also, probably you've noticed that friend groups do not work on DW the same way as on LJ, due to DW's approach of splitting the permissions into "subscription" and "access", so the corresponding protocol functions are missing. (I had volunteered to add them, hopefully it will be accomplished in the very near future, as soon as I'm done with the friend manager part of my client -

qtxpost, which was already mentioned - the documentation for the code is somewhat lacking, but feel free to ask any questions if you need :)

ooh, i planned to do that just because i am more familiar with c++ .. thats the only reason. other day someone (irc:exor674) referred to me xml-rpc libraries for c++ (libxmlrpc http://xmlrpc-c.sourceforge.net/) .. and the documentation is great (http://xmlrpc-c.sourceforge.net/doc/).

And about permissions provided in the protocols, i was referred to eXpostulate , and was informed about the differences in the protocol methods. Though a reference link would help a lot in that :P !!

Which all permissions are splitted?? can i get a link for the documentation.

thank you for your comment, that was helpful.

It's the watch/trust thing - have a look at "subscribe/access" at http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Dreamwidth.org:_FAQ#Subscribe.2FAccess and the server implementation details at http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/WTF_Backend (maybe there's more, I'm still finding my way around the wiki)

Oh and I used a Qt-based XML-RPC implementation at http://code.google.com/p/qtxmlrpc/ (although had to fix a few things as it didn't work right away).

ooh....so its like public/private settings, just the difference i see is that it is centred basically on the subscribers of the post?? this is what basic understanding i gained about the subscribe/access feature (http://www.gliffy.com/publish/2049500/).. please correct me if you see fit!

Actually I just tried to say what

paumamma said much better - why the friend functions do not work on DW the same way as on LJ.

Not quite - subscribe doesn't affect what you see when viewing a particular entry - it just affects whether or not they show up on your reading page.

Also, you don't need to have a subject line saying who you're responding to, as the reply threading on DW does that automatically.

yes yes i understand that !so it means even if i can view public contents of other users(on their profile), only the pages that i subscribed to will show up in my reading page!!

Exactly.

wow that was fast :) .. keeping that aside

what i meant with the flowchart was to just view the situation where a user has subscribed to my post (knowing that even if he hasn't he can view my public posts), can view my private content if and only if i specified so (added him in the trust list).

Dreamwidth doesn't have "friends" the way LiveJournal does - it has a watch list (people whose journal you read) and a trust list (people with access to protected entries in your journal) instead. (And it has watch groups - aka reading filters - and trust groups - like the LiveJournal custom friends groups.)

thanks for that .. !!

whats the use of watch groups and trust groups .. can't you just specify who can/can't read my private content?? that should suffice right?

as in, if i flag a friend of mine trusted then do i need to put him in any trust group?

It allows you to specify in more detail - someone who's not in any particular group, just has access, will be able to see access-locked entries but not custom-locked entries. Then you can choose to lock a particular entry to a sub-group of the people you've given access to, or a combination of access groups, or even just private. For instance, there might be things you want to lock to just family, or just people you don't know offline, or whatever.

The way filters (groups) work is that they let you read or post to a sub-set of your access list or subscriptions list.

So, if I have a reading filter, it will let me see only a portion of the number of accounts I'm subscribed to -- maybe I'm subscribed to a community that posts 500 posts a day, and if I read my whole reading page, the community will drown out any other posts that people I'm subscribed to make. So, I create a reading filter that doesn't include that community, but does include everyone else, and I read that filter regularly and then go read the community itself when I have time to catch up.

Posting filters (access filters) are for if you want to make a post that's only visible by a few people on your list. Say I have my mother on my access list, but I want to bitch about her -- I'd make a filter that didn't include her and post to that filter. Or if I know that half my readers aren't interested in my locked posts about a thing, I'd make a filter that only includes people who want to read about the thing and post all Thing-related posts to that filter. Or, some people (myself include) have a very small filter of people who read their fiction that they're writing while it's still being written, to offer improvements and stuff. That kind of thing.

so is it like you are including all the people you want in a group and give them permission... but while posting you can eliminate a particular person from reading that post ?

Ha!
My client has DW, LJ, IJ, DJ, and Izi cross-posting & twitter and identi.ca functions.
The thing is, though, it only posts...does not read entries, manage friends, etc....
In the works!

Good luck with your project!

:)
tony

yes.. i am going through eXpostulate(it was referred to me as a reference application by many) ... and i would definitely be needing your help in my project.

its not as easy as it seems , would take a lot of quality time. But its worth the effort.

Of course, my code is all GPL/Free Software, so, help yourself!
I will be interested in seeing what you come up with.
I imagine you're not writing tcl/tk (not popular), but if you have anything to contribute back to my project, it would be most welcomed, of course.

no .. your's was the first project in tcl/tlk that i went through, thanks to you learnt a bit of a new language :) .. ! i plan to do the project in QT, but then i was asked to look into xml-rpc for c++ as well! so my days now are filled with learning about the protocols and comparing QT and xml-rpc :)

though do you have a documentation for eXpostulate that i can take as reference!

I just started writing Xpostulate last week, and haven't written any documentation yet.
The code is heavily commented, though, which might be useful.

Later on, or within the next couple of days I intend to write up a howto and stick it on my wiki. I'll try to remember to post back here when I do.
In the meantime, perhaps you should join <http://xpostulate.dreamwidth.org">the Xpostulate DreamWidth community.

(experiment ... sadly, I don't know how community links work on DW, just user and cut tags.) (I think this one will point to lj

xpostulate )

ha, the lj comm tag works on dw, not pointing to lj.

xpostulate

Yes, all the old LJ tags work as well as the DW-form tags, so people don't need to change their habits if they don't want to.

Huh...so I didn't really need to add DW specific tags to Xpostulate.
Nonetheless, I think it's good that I did, anyway.

:D

yeah sure ... a wiki would be a great idea :) ... i'll be eagerly waitimg for it.

Oh, there's already a wiki for Xpostulate.
I mean to post a manual/howto on there, though.

ooh ... but the wiki is pretty brief, i suppose you would be adding the documentation to the page in near future.

I'll be adding a distinct page for the manual/docs, in fact.

hi, I think I have gained some understanding of how to develop a client for DreamWidth journal, i would be using xml-rpc libraries for c++ and taking eXpostulate as a reference. Now, i would like to submit a final proposal for the project. So, if you could tell me what all should I add other than those I specified above in the proposal, so that it would be more promising, I suppose I would then submit the proposal by the end of the day.

regards.

Judging from the comments to the latest post in

dw_biz, the key thing people want is for it to work on Mac as well as Linux or Windows. How easy would it be to port to other operating systems as well?

about that, i specified above that i would be working on the QT framework. And as QT framework is cross-platform it would work on mac, linux, and windows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_%28framework%29#Varieties

although it supports mobile devices as well, i would be concentrating on linux(ubuntu), then windows and then finally mac. In doing this i would have to make sure that i refrain from using OS dependant libraries and make use of cross-platform libraries, so that it would be easier to port from linux to windows and mac!

this thread explains pretty well about the requirement for doing so... making minimalistic use of OS-dependant libraries, that is.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2035249/if-i-use-qt-for-windows-will-my-application-run-great-on-linux-mac-windows#answers

This is one of the reasons I like to work with Tcl/Tk.
Although I develop primarily on+for gnu/linux, tcl/tk is fully crossplatform, so, unless I call linux-specific system resources, my code can be run on mac/win/lin/bsd.
Python/tkinter, which I also like, is the same, and/or perl/tk.
I think Qt will do lin/mac/bsd easily enough, but, unless I'm mistaken, Qt on Win might be a bit of a P.I.T.A.

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GSoC2010 : Desktop Client

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Proposal submission

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