J5’s Blog

Sean’s wedding is down in the books and now it is time for my twin sister’s wedding. For that I am flying out to Rome today and will be running around Italy for the next two weeks. Four days in Rome, three in Venice, three in Lake Como and one in Milan.

I won’t be bringing a computer so I will only be checking my public e-mail accounts infrequently at internet cafe’s. The best way to reach me will be by phone.

For those attending the Boston GNOME Summit this year the open bar social, affectionately known as the Beer Summit will once again be held at Flat Top Johnny’s with four reserved pool tables from 8:00pm-closing on Sunday October 11th. Chat about the latest GNOME technologies over some beers and a friendly game of pool. It is our way of saying thank you to our contributors and community.

I myself will be in Italy until the 11th so I may or may not be able to make it out depending on how I feel but I have left the conference in the capable hands of Colin Walters, Jon McCann and Adam Jackson. They will be there to make sure you get your coffee, find your hacking room and enjoy yourself during the summit.

I am proud to announce version 0.1.0 of the kamaloka-js AMQP bindings. This initial release is considered to be an alpha quality release. It is there for you to break and give feedback so we can continue to improve the bindings and eventually get them to the point where they can be used to run mission critical applications.

In the next few days I will be concentrating on documenting the design of the bindings so anyone who wants to can easily jump in and contribute patches as well as suggestions. Please visit the project page to find out more and see how you can help out.

What’s in store for the future?

• High level bindings for each of the major AMQP client patterns to get developers up and running with AMQP in the browser fast
• QMF bindings for working with the QMF management console

Where can I find this release?

• kamaloka-js-0.1.0.tar.bz2 (sha1)
• kamaloka-js-0.1.0.zip (sha1)

What’s in this release?

• Initial release
• Connection handshaking works
• AMQP lowlevel bindings for version 0.10 of the AMQP Protocol mostly complete
• Higher level bindings implementing the publisher/subscriber pattern is ready for use

How can I find out more?

• Project page: https://fedorahosted.org/kamaloka-js
• FAQ: https://fedorahosted.org/kamaloka-js/wiki/Faq
• Mailing list: https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/kamaloka-js-devel

Kamaloka-js is an implementation of the AMQP messaging protocol (http://amqp.org/) in native JavaScript released under the MIT license. It is setup to be used with Orbited (http://orbited.org/) but can be used with any library which produce TCPSockets in the browser similar to Orbited. Kamaloka bindings are generated from qpid XML protocol description files.

While I am developing on Firefox today I tested and fixed some issues under Chromium (webkit based), Opera (opera based) and Konquorer (khtml based). My pub/sub demo worked the same in all four browsers (and at the same time I might add). We tried with IE8 on Luke’s machine but the error messages were cryptic. I’ll have to get my hands on a windows box at some point but I’m guessing the biggest issues are going to be trailing commas or keywords which are similar in the amqp spec and javascript (e.g. I ran into void and class keyword issues with the webkit browsers).

One thing to note is Chromium’s integrated debugger is a lot faster than Firebug. I haven’t used it extensively but if it can break at breakpoints and introspect objects without getting screwy I might end up switching. I really like firebug but lately it has become dog slow. It usually takes a couple of minutes of waiting for each frame of data to be processed and displayed while under Chromium with their debugger on, the slowdown is noticeable but not significant compared to when the debugger is off.

UPDATE: Chromium’s debugger is probably faster because it doesn’t actually do anything that I can see. It displays scripts but doesn’t actually break into the code

Thinking Outside The Box: Bringing the Network back into G(N)OME

Thanks to Paul Cutler’s excellent work on GNOME Journal we have a great stream of articles to keep us up to date on the happening of GNOME. Please consider helping him out if you have time on your hands. It is a great way for those who don’t program but still love GNOME to become a producer instead of just a consumer in the GNOME ecosystem. The potential for making an impact with contributions such as these is just as important as those who contribute with code.

On the heels of Paul’s interview with myself I thought I should post the slides of my talk. Unfortunately the video of my talk did not seem to make it with the numerous other published videos. I’m not sure why that is but it is something we should improve on next year. Being able to reach those who could not attend the conference is just as important as presenting to those in the conference hall.

This is a reminder to all you GNOME hackers that the 9th annual Boston GNOME Summit is only one month away. On October 10th through the 12th join your fellow GNOMies at the MIT Sloan building E51 for a grand hacking event. I don’t have to remind people that GNOME 3.0 is just around the corner. Come and be part of the effort to continue GNOME’s excellence as the premier Open Source Desktop Environment and application platform.

Details
October 10th, 11th and 12th

MIT Sloan Building (E51)
Cambridge, MA
Rooms 315, 325, 335, 345

Tell us you are coming

Please go to the Boston Summit wiki page to find out more information and let us know you are coming.

Travel Sponsorship

For the first time the Travel Committee has been given a modest budget to send people to the Summit. If you feel you have something to contribute but don’t have the funds to get here please go to the Travel page to find out how you can apply for sponsorship.

Travel Visa’s

If you are coming from a country from which the US requires you obtain a visa please contact the Travel Committee so that they may send you a letter inviting you to the conference. You will need this to apply for a visa.

What is the Boston Gnome Summit?

The Boston Summit is a three-day hackfest for GNOME developers and contributors. It is not primarily aimed at users or new contributors, but if you want to jump right into the deep end, it’s a fantastic way to meet everyone and get involved. Unlike traditional conferences, the Boston Summit is all about getting developers together and getting things done. While there are some non-hacking sessions, they are geared heavily towards many-to-many, interactive discussion and planning, rather than one-to-many presentations.

About

Kamaloka-js is an implementation of the AMQP messaging protocol in native JavaScript. It is setup to be used with Orbited but can be used with any library which produce TCPSockets in the browser similar to Orbited. Kamaloka bindings are generated from qpid XML protocol description files.

Status

You can currently :

• negotiate a connection with an AMQP 0.10 server (support for adding and loading different versions is there if a new spec comes along)
• issue any commands and controls described by the spec (whether or not the server is doing anything with them has not been verified yet but, it doesn’t drop your connection)

Some limitation:

• for now we don’t handle multiple frames or channels though this feature is planned down the road
• we don’t do automatic version negotiation, but then we only implement one version

Why Kamaloka

amqp-js was taken by a project that implements the 0-8 AMQP protocol through Flash. If some day the qpid project wanted to use kamaloka-js as the definitive AMQP javascript implementation I would be happy to rename it qpid-js, but I am not that presumptuous. The thought process for the name went like this:

qpid->cupid->kama->kamaloka

Since Kama is in the same lexicon as Moksha (another project I work on which will be using the bindings) I thought it fit nice. It also allows me to name the QMF bindings kamarupa-js since according to the wikipedia Kama page “Kama-rupa is a subtle body or aura composed of desire, while Kama-loka is the realm this inhabits.” So QMF inhabits AMQP

Playground

Included in the distribution is a playground for testing the bindings in interesting AMQP configurations on your local machine. As pieces get implemented the playground will expand to show off different ways of using the bindings. Bellow is an example of using the current low level bindings based off the python subscribe example:

<script type="text/JavaScript">
   Orbited.settings.port = 9000;
   amqp_broker_port = 7000;

   amqp_conn = amqp.Connection({host: 'localhost',
                                port: amqp_broker_port,
                                send_hook: function(msg) { // for debugging
                                                       append_msg('SENT', msg);
                                                  },
                                recive_hook: function(data) { // for debugging
                                                        append_msg('RECV', data);
                                                    }
                             });
    amqp_conn.start();

    // You should have your server generate a UUID since browser methods
    // are unreliable at best
    session = amqp_conn.create_session('not_a_great_id' + (new Date().getTime() + Math.random()));

    var fedoraproject = "org.fedoraproject-" + session.name;
    session.Queue('declare', {queue:fedoraproject, exclusive:true});
    session.Exchange('bind', {exchange: "amq.topic",
                              queue: fedoraproject,
                              binding_key: "org.fedoraproject.#"});

    // Bind each queue to the control queue so we know when to stop
    session.Exchange('bind', {exchange:"amq.topic",
                              queue: fedoraproject,
                              binding_key:"control"});
</script>

Give me the code

• Project homepage & trac: https://fedorahosted.org/kamaloka-js/
• Mailing list: https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/kamaloka-js-devel
• git: git clone http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/kamaloka-js.git