[Sugar-devel] [ASLO] Tech Report

[Aleksey Lim]

This is activities.sugarlabs.org report to cover only technical
ASLO aspects.

== ASLO maintaining ==

Actually, we didn't have any explicit workflows except just coding ASLO
patch on top of AMO code base, maintaining ASLO servers, and more or
less regular approving of new activities by not many people.

Nevertheless, it would be useful to have more explicit picture:

    Technical support, coding and server maintaining
    (content related changes only by editors request):

        Aleksey Lim (lead)

    Content support, ie, ASLO editors:

        Anish Mangal
        Bernie Innocenti
        David Farning
        Gary Martin
        Gonzalo Odiard
        Luke Faraone
        Pablo Flores
        Rafael Ortiz (lead)
        Sascha Silbe
        Simon Schampijer
        Thomas Gilliard
        Walter Bender

This is how ASLO staff looks today, technical people by recent changes
in ASLO code base and content people is a list of current ASLO editors
in the database. Since it is useful to have only one last person to
kick, there are leads:

    Aleksey Lim (coding, server maintaining)
    Rafael Ortiz (content editors)

Organizational. For technical part it is more or less clean, it is the
code. For content management, it is not so good. The activity of ASLO
editors is low, would be useful to have more editors. So, there is huge
amount of work for editors to make ASLO more community/educational
oriented.

== New Features ==

1.  Activity version in collections.
    If version is set for collection activity, only this particular
    version can be downloaded from collection.

2.  Micro-format interface.

        http://activities.sugarlabs.org/services/micro-format.php?collection_nickname=<nick>[&sugar=<version>]
        e.g.
        http://activities.sugarlabs.org/services/micro-format.php?collection_nickname=gcompris&sugar=0.88

    * if activity version was not set in collection and sugar request
      argument wasn't passed, then return recent activity version
    * if activity version was not set in collection and sugar request
      argument was passed, then return either recent activity version
      only for this sugar or nothing
    * if activity version was set in collection, regardless sugar request
      argument, exactly this version will be returned

== Roadmap ==

The upstream is in process of switching to new AMO code base, django
based (python based framework). We need to do the same. So, the plan is:

* Reimplement current ASLO patch to do the exactly the same in new AMO
* Add new but not breaking current behaviour:
  * Upload by one click
  * Experimental support of bundle-less activities [1]

The plan is having new ASLO ready for broad, pre-production testing,
until 2011-04-06.

=== Upload by one click ===

The only that will be required is just uploading a .xo to the server.
All needed metadata will be fetched from the bundle:

* activity.info, activity metadata
* NEWS, release notes
* po/, translation of activity.info fields

=== Bundle-less activities ===

Excluding network-less environments, the only thing anyone should know
about any activity, to run it from anywhere, is an unique Web url.
It is based on 0install[2] project. Network based nature, though, does
not mean the it will be useless w/o the net. It will be possible
to make selfcontained bundle by packaging activity itself and all its
dependencies to one .xo.

[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Platform_Team/Doers_environment#Sugar_doers_workflow
[2] http://0install.net/goals.html