Tue 28 Oct 2008
Announcing the Fedora Community Beta Site
Posted by J5 under Fedora , Python , community , usability , video[14] Comments
Fedora Community Screencast – Background music edited from the song Conversion by Kourosh Dini off his Live At Bliss Gardens album (CC Some Rights Reserved)
Fedora Community, codename MyFedora, integrates the Fedora infrastructure into one interface focused on usability and streamlining user workflows. This is a beta release with a production version to be released alongside Fedora 10. While the first revisions are focused on Fedora Developers, the underlying Moksha framework, based on top of the Python WSGI TurboGears 2 platform, provides a base for writing self contained applications which can integrate to create one large application. The applications seen on Fedora Community interact with the Fedora infrastructure to produce a single, unified view. In the future applications can be written to interact with Transifex for translations, listen to upstream for project releases and even federate between infrastructures such as OLPC being able to have a view into their services along side the services they use in Fedora.
We are calling on Fedora members to test out the site and file bugs. We plan to roll this out alongside Fedora 10 so pitch in and help us make a great release.
October 28th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
So the only question I have are, who are all the people responsible for getting this up and going.
I want to line them all up and give them each a big bear hug of gratitude.
-jef
October 28th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
That would be me, Luke, Toshio, Mo, and Eve
October 28th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
TurboGears again?!
All the Fedora apps (bodhi, pkgdb, fas2) are slooooowwww.
I really don’t understand why Fedora want to yse TG when Django is so similar and much, much better.
Please explain!
October 28th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
Mike, I think you fall into the trap of using anecdotal information in order to back up a wild claim. First TG2 is built off the very fast Pylons WSGI engine. We also have developers who have a good relationship with the TG developers which means we have input into TG development. A large number of Fedora devs know TG, why learn a new engine? TG2 is fully WSGI compliant and furthermore is a small core which pulls in other standard libraries to do most of the heavy lifting. So if something is slow we can always move to a different module (you can even jump into Django apps if Django’s controllers are WSGI complient)
So far in our benchmarking the only slow part we have seen is the genshi templates which we will be replacing with mako templates.
October 28th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
@Mike,
We chose TurboGears over Django for *many* reasons, but mainly because we wanted the flexibility and power to utilize the best pre-existing components out there, such as SQLAlchemy, Pylons, ToscaWidgets, Mako/Genshi, etc for various layers of the stack — without being locked into a gigantic monolithic ‘reinvent every wheel’ framework such as Django. By being fully WSGI compliant, we are also able to wield a vast plethora of WSGI middleware, such as WebError/repoze.{profile,squeeze,who}/etc. There is nothing stoping anyone from writing a Moksha application using Django components, but we don’t want to lock people into a specific [subpar] technology from the start.
With regard to the “slowness” of various apps such as bodhi, pkgdb, fas; that is mostly caused by database lag, and also due to the fact that each request to bodhi/pkg triggers a *few* JSON calls to FAS. In the case of Moksha, we have resolved that issue by utilizing extensive caching of things like credentials, so we don’t have to tax fas every request.
October 29th, 2008 at 2:39 am
When opened Fedora site in IW or FF 3.03, it asks for security exceptions stuffs. So i had to add an exception to FF/IW to move on.
I think this is some kinda security measure which u guys are missed out in u r site.
October 29th, 2008 at 9:18 am
no, that is because we are using a self-signed cert for the test deployment. The production version should have a valid cert like the rest of the infrastructure.
October 29th, 2008 at 9:19 am
BTW, I have only tested on FF under Fedora 9.
October 29th, 2008 at 10:21 am
This looks great !
I don’t know if that’s what supposed to happen in the future, but it would be great it this became some kind of a portal, like netvibes or iGoogle.
There would be lots of widgets, one for any Fedora Application, and each one could choose the ones he wants to see, and where. I, as a package maintainer and ambassador, would like to see informations about builds and marketing issues. An artist would choose different widgets, etc…
October 29th, 2008 at 11:30 am
bochecha,
That’s the plan
October 29th, 2008 at 11:44 am
@J5:
Then I just can’t wait to see it happen :]
October 31st, 2008 at 11:20 am
Will you be releasing the code once it’s final? Or now? I briefly looked for a link but didn’t find one.
October 31st, 2008 at 2:12 pm
Code has been open since the start under GPLv2. It is in git at fedorahosted.org. You can also browse the source at https://fedorahosted.org/myfedora/ which I liked to for bug reports but failed to mention also contains everything else. A note of warning, the code will be going through a massive cleanup after Fedora 10 as we make apps a lot easier to create and split out the Moksha backend from the fedora apps. At that point we should have the Moksha platform project and the Fedora Community apps project with MyFedora going away.
November 7th, 2008 at 9:55 am
thanks