Marty's typepad

Late GSoC Wrap-up: Social Feed

This year's Google Summer of Code is over and here's the status of the Social Feed project. Let me repeat what the Social Feed is actually all about. It's a project aiming at aggregating your social media content into one single feed of posts, using Akonadi in the backend and Plasma applet on the frontend (but it can be anything that can work on top of Akonadi, even full fledged app or some HTML5 craziness). Here's how the plasmoid currently looks:

It started as a testing plasmoid (and sort-of still is; serves mainly for me learning QML), but as I was unable to port the current Plasma's Microblog plasmoid, I continued improving this. Next week I'll look at the Microblog plasmoid again and will try again, ditching this plasmoid afterwards. Anyways let's have a look on what has been done and is ready.

From the screen you can see that Facebook posts are parsed completely - showing a thumbnail, link title, number of comments and likes. These can't be displayed yet, but they are loaded and stored in Akonadi, so it's just a matter of adding the visuals for it. Twitter provides so-called "Entities", which contains parsed links, image thumbnails, hashtags and whatnot. I had a trouble receiving these (you need to explicitly specify you want to receive them) and took me few days before I finally gave up trying to figure it out. A month later (yesterday) I was refactoring some code and re-reading Twitter docs and I saw what was wrong, so I finally fixed that and soon there will be Twitter posts with thumbs and links and stuff.

Basic posting to social networks now works for Facebook, Twitter and Identi.ca. Right now it posts to all networks, but users will be able to select to which network it should be posted.

All code is available in KDE's git, I hope to fine up the akonadi-facebook resource in time for 4.10 release and have it shipped by default. We'll see about the microblog one.

Here are the parts that are needed with their current status:

KOAuth - splitted from Plasma Microblog and slightly refactored, supports Twitter and Identi.ca only right now. The Facebook resource has its own auth mechanism for now, which I might port to KOAuth in time.

Akonadi-Social-Utils - these are special utilities and shared bits among the other components, it's stable and all and I want it to merge into kdepim-libs, all that is missing are unit tests, which I'm no friend with. Yet.

Akonadi-Facebook - the Facebook resource, pretty much all working, requires Akonadi-Social-Utils now

Akonadi-Microblog-NG - new microblog resource, using KOAuth for authentication, getting home timeline and posting works.

Social-Feed - the feed itself, a QML plugin and a model on top of Akonadi, contains the testing plasmoid as well. It fetches all items with the proper mimetype, so if you write a resource, that stores SocialFeedItem items, they will automatically appear in the feed, no matter what they are. More on that in some later post.

Even though the GSoC is now finished, I'm continuing working on this thanks to sponsoring by Blue Systems. And the future feature plan includes: retweeting and liking posts from the interface, adding comments to Facebook posts and replies to microblog posts, sharing pictures would be nice, needs some investigating though (hello kipi-plugins), kickass look'n'feel and that's probably it for the nearest future.

Stay tuned :)

GSoC: Social Feed - all out on git!

Here's some good news. The code for the whole Social Feed thing is now clean & stable enough, so I decided to finally put it online, where the development will now continue.

Right now it consists of several parts (which you all need in order to have it working):

1) KOAuth library

This is a library handling the OAuth stuff in Twitter/Identi.ca. It's a modified version of the Microblog dataengine auth mechanism. The code is quite heavy and can be simplified significantly with the help of QtOAuth library, so I plan to refactor it on top of QOAuth class.

The nice thing about this approach is that we don't need to store user's password/credentials. User still has to put them in, but then it will authorize him with the service and return an OAuth token, which is stored in KWallet and that's all that is stored (well the username is stored as well, but that's for convenience only, the password is never saved anywhere).

2) Akonadi Social Utils

This one provides several utilities for both Akonadi resources and the Social Feed itself. It contains an Akonadi serializer for serializing/deserializing the data to/from Akonadi database and an avatar provider, which fetches avatars from the social networks and stores them in cache (KImageCache). The provider is asynchronous and works dynamically with the Social Feed model - whenever the view asks for the avatar, it is first checked if it is in the cache and if not, it starts a KJob to fetch it, once it's fetched, it will immediately show up in the view (and stay cached for the future). I want to start the avatar provider as soon as you start syncing the feed data in Akonadi, so it is all downloaded in one batch and you can view the feed even offline without missing avatars.

By using this serializer and the correct mime-type, you can have arbitrary data included in the feed, be it rss, birthdays, reminders, whatever you need. But someone needs to write such Akonadi resource ;)

This library and the koauth library miss the proper cmake files for finding them, so they're just hardcoded in the linker command for now, so you might have troubles with compilation if you try building this in non-standard prefix.

I plan to include this library in kdepim-libs, so it can all be available "by default" and you don't have to install one more package.

3) Akonadi resources

The microblog and Facebook resources now use both the same serializer (from the Utils lib above), that means they are both stored in the same way inside Akonadi and allows easy and straightforward querying and displaying.  The microblog now supports both Twitter and Identi.ca and you can add it twice, once for each network. The configuration is a bit crap at the moment, but at least works ;) I also don't want to spend too much time on it as we'll soon have a central place to configure all kinds of accounts in KDE and so the configuration should be moved there then.

4) Social Feed

Social Feed is basically an Akonadi model, which is exported as a QML plugin, so it can be used in QML plasmoids. This repo also contains a testing plasmoid, which only tests the model and is not intended for real usage (though it might work ;).

I also became the maintainer of Akonadi Facebook resource and will soon do a release. We're also working together with Pankaj Bhambhani on splitting up the library (libkfacebook) out of the resource and turn it into a standalone library. The microblog resource also has its own library and it's the same architecture, so maybe in the future we'll see a merge of these two into something like "libksocialnet" (no plans yet).

The ultimate goal is to have all these components in such a shape that it can all be shipped with default KDE installation. With the release of KDE Workspaces & Application 4.9.0 just outside the door, the nearest target could be 4.10, so hopefully I'll have it ready by then.

GSoC: Social Feed - it works!

Picture worth thousand words:

Now other 281 words about it. What you see here is the most crappiest plasmoid ever written. By me. It's basically just a testing UI, in the end I'd like to end up using the existing implementation of Microblog applet, which was greatly rewritten for 4.9 release by Sebas. Right now there are 2 working Akonadi resources - Facebook and Twitter/Identi.ca (they have compatible API, so it's just one resource). The Facebook one is up online on KDE's git server, the other one is not yet. The reason is that it still misses a configuration (so I have my credentials hardcoded..ehm), because I was waiting for Akademy to discuss the new rising thing called WebAccounts. Since this will be here no sooner than a month, I'm about to write a simple config dialog for that resource and put it all online, where the development will continue.

On top of Akonadi there's a SocialFeed model, which is basically just an extended Akonadi model, which provides the data for the plasmoid. This is also not yet online as it's lots of testing/commented out code, which I don't really want to put out there. But I'm about to clean it all up and put it online, so no worries.

For the closest future I'll be rewriting those two Akonadi resources to both have the same serialization and stuff, so it will all use one common format and so one can later simply write new Akonadi resource with the mimetype "text/x-vnd.akonadi.socialfeed" and have it automatically included in the feed (if it provides the correct serialization and stuff). I'll write more about this later, when I have the whole thing finished.

That's all for today, stay tuned for more updates...

GSoC: Making KDE more social

This year I would like to bring social networks to your KDE desktops. To have your Facebook stream, Twitter/Identi.ca feed always on your fingertips without the need of a browser. But not just inprisoned in a webview widget, but have the data itself really present and integrated "under the hood". We already have technologies for all the parts - data storing and processing as well as for data visualization. 

 

For the data processing part we decided to use Akonadi, which serves as data cache. Each social network can have its own Akonadi resource (the backend), that gets the data from servers and store them in the cache. Right now I finished patching akonadi-facebook resource, which can be found on KDE's git. My plan is to shape it up so it can be shipped with the default Workspace/PIM install. Currently it feteches the news feed, your notifications, friends, events and notes.

Next resource is for Twitter/Identi.ca. There is one very old and not very good one. So I'm writing one from scratch. Well sort of as I'm using parts of Sebas' Microblog implementation for the backend, which you'll be able to try out in the upcoming 4.9 release. Current state is not really usable yet - but it can authenticate users and get their timeline (just raw data for now). Once it's in just a bit usable shape, I'll push this to a scratch repo.

Google Plus resource might come later when they open their API.

 

Once we have the data in an easily processable way, we can do whatever we want with them (read "create awesome native apps"). So for the visualization part/applictaion, I want to use Plasma at first. QML plasmoid capable of displaying data from all the sites together, something very alike Nokia's implementation in the N9 phone, mockup below.

The idea is to have all the networks aggregated at one place. With optional posting to all of them, ie. if you want to post only to Facebook, you'll check just Facebook, if all, check all the networks. However posting is a whole different story, so first of all I'll make sure that reading works perfectly, then I'll move to posting.

This QML plasmoid can also be used as a standalone application. But for those of you preferring other existing apps, there's a plan to have plugins for Choqok based on Akonadi, which will allow perfect system integration - if you read a post or refresh the feed from Choqok, it will automatically do so in all other apps (because they all share the same backend). Please note that this does not mean that Choqok is being ported to Akonadi, it's not. These will be just optional plugins.

I also want to turn social notifications to system notifications. Someone will comment your post on facebook - Plasma spawns a notification. A reply to your tweet arrives - notification. And so on. Next part of system integration will be with the new-but-yet-unreleased WebAccounts stuff, which will allow you to configure all your web services at one place in System Settings (including Telepathy). This is still heavy work-in-progress and we'll have a BoF at Akademy on Monday (probably) about it, so if you're interested, come and participate.

The ultimate vision is to have all nicely integrated - you'll see the latest Facebook post in the KDE Telepathy contact list, you'll be able to start a chat from the plasmoid etc. We have lots of the needed pieces already in place, we just miss the links between them..

 

I plan to start the UI next week, I'll post more updates when there's already something usable to test :)