Perhaps you’ve heard that Mozilla has released its new mobile operating system Firefox OS. This new operating system is a breath of fresh air in a market that focuses much of its development into repackaging HTML5 and javascript websites into native “apps”. Indeed Firefox OS lets developers create an application to run on their platform by simply adding a description file to it, the OS is entirely written in HTML5 and javascript itself so websites just run natively on it.

At Movim we’re very excited by this new opportunity and we plan to release Movim as a webapp for Firefox OS. This means that we could be the second social platform on the Mozilla marketplace (after Twitter) and get more attention from the general public.

That also means that our existing server platform will not suffice to back a webapp. So we’ve invested into an AWS instance that now runs Movim’s reference pod. This isn’t an official pod, as we insist we will never have one. However it will be maintained by us and kept in sync with the development trunk. And thus it has all the goodness you’ll find in the next version!

Before you rush to the new pod, consider making us a small donation. We already supported Flattr, and now we also accept donations in Bitcoin. We try to run with minimal expenses, but still need a bit of money to cover the domain names and AWS hosting.

You can now check out the latest code, or go ahead and try out the latest and greatest pod!

What’s up ?

It’s been months since you last heard of Movim, nevertheless the project has improved a lot. Let’s review the main changes.

The installer has been greatly simplified. It doesn’t require you to register on an Movim node if you already have a Jabber account elsewhere. MoXL replaced JAXL as the underlying XMPP library and allows to connect directly to any Jabber account anywhere and creates a local cache of your profile on the web server.

This cache has pros and cons:

• profile loading is greatly optimised, whatever device you use at any time and any place
• heavier bits that can’t be stored on the XMPP server (photos, music, videos) that will make an entrance in the version 0.7 will be stored, with the cache, on the web server (this is also Jappix’s behaviour)

Because of this, you’ll have to be “loyal” to your favorite Movim node. On the other hand, those items will benefit from an import/export feature that will let you transfer them from node to node.

Finally, to compare stand-alone and web-based Jabber clients, it is necessary to connect through a BOSH proxy that serves as glue between XMPP and HTTP, which also generates some latency, making cache mandatory (this is also the case for Jappix).

Version 0.6 was released at the beginning of December after five months of development. It brings the following features:

• simplified installer
• a re-designed CSS theme
• a WYSIWYG editor
• privacy options for posts (public/private)
• more translations
• improved user experience (although the UI still has some slow downs)
• many improvements to make contacts loading faster
• implemented of the XEP-0115 Entity Capabilities, which enables the client to communicate its features and the extent of its XMPP support to the server
• implemented DIGEST-MD5 and CRAM-MD5 as more secure log-in mechanisms

Version 0.6.1 was released soon afterwards in mid-January to address SSL certificates problems with BOSH servers.

Movim 0.7 is being worked on and its feature list contains the following:

• media hosting (pictures, videos etc.)
• XMPP groups management
• an administration interface

You can try out the latest development version at http://polytech.mov.im/ :

• with the jabber ID demonstration@movim.eu
• with the password demonstration

Why develop yet another XMPP library?

Movim has specific needs and Jaxl didn’t provide for some of them. Jaxl was conceived as a standalone framework that works in a synchronous fashion with a heavy javascript part whereas Movim is asynchronous and has a heavy and complex server-side. Jaxl is also very complex and difficult to maintain, much of the code provides unnecessary modularity and dirty hacks were needed to link it with Movim.

Example: The requirement to parse for a second time each packet received by Jaxl to extract informations while keeping the structure, the base parser “putting flat” all packet informations.

The Jaxl complexity was heaving performances and code size (almost 65% of Movim), causing serious delays on small machines moderately stressed. The last major defect was related to the integration with Movim: sessions.

For instance, interfacing Movim’s sessions with Jaxl’s relied on very dirty glue code that created a maze of callbacks and exceptions so that Movim could be synchronised with Jaxl’s status and vice versa.

Moxl cleans this all up

The Jabber class that previously glued Jaxl and Movim has disappeared altogether. The sessions system could be cleaned up and simplified further. We now only have a single session managed by Movim instead of two, which means that when the XMPP session is disconnected, so will the web session.

Moxl features a powerful events system called XEC (XMPP Events Controller) that lets it smartly route communication packages and thus simulate a stateful system. You can find XEC’s documentation online.

Moxl lets Movim connect to existing XMPP accounts

Thanks to Moxl, Movim can now connect to an existing XMPP account straight through. There is no need for a web-server side registration any more, and thus Movim does not store user account details, leaving this responsibility to the XMPP server and preventing data leaks. The project’s documentation is online and you can find the project’s code on Launchpad.

What of its support in Movim?

Testing of Moxl happens within Movim. Therefore the library is entirely supported by the social network only 2.5 weeks after the development started. Movim on Moxl has already reached the same feature level as Movim 0.5 but with a much cleaner and maintainable code. It is furthermore possible to connect to a large variety of accounts and to connect without first registering on the web interface.

Conclusion

Moxl give a boost to Movim and accelerate its development by simplifying the code and provide easier error management. This also benefits the user with more granular error messages to take better decisions. With Movim 0.5, when an XMPP error happened, Movim just skipped it, Jaxl didn’t provide error reports.

Porting Movim to the new library took only 2 weeks, thus it is realistic to expect a new release with only Moxl by the end of the year.

• Download in .webm
• Download in .mp4
• Download slideshow in .odp

We want to offer a transcript in the conference for the visually impaired and its translation to English. To do this, we need volunteers to make this work incredibly long and boring, that is impossible for a single person to achieve this goal.

Here is the full transcript produced by Clement, and here is the beginning of the timing of the transcription in SRT format. I advise you to open the video in Audacity, which you can listen to the soundtrack and note the time very precisely. Each sentence should be cut to stick on the sound.

The SRT file will be translated after. You could find all the others podcasts on the Wiki.

We have heard that some people would like to help us. It’s interesting precisely because we need resources: Movim is a non-profit project.

If you visit http://pod.movim.eu you will see only two nodes: the Etenil one’s is around 600 accounts and begin to saturate. It’s annoying because visitors will not have the opportunity to choose their node, depending on the update, the number of members or the country that hosts (legislation). Then, the network may start to centralize, which is against the nature of the project.

That’s why we would like a special form of contribution: maintain your own public node!

The only thing that would make an additional service would be your agreement to be among the nodes of our public network (on http://pod.movim.eu ), to offer more choice to people who want to explore, experiment, test and debug. Movim is still under heavy development, remember that there is no automatic update.

If you are willing to participate, leave a comment with the address of your server. We need you!

Thanks.

Here is a short summary of the past few months. Version 0.4 of Movim was released the 28^th November 2011 and published on the 5^th February 2012, along with the website pod.movim.eu. It came with an impressive count of new features and received two minor updates later on. Movim 0.4.1 was released the 17^th March 2012 (bug fixes), then Movim 0.4.2 (improved installer) silently made it out on the 27^th May 2012, being only announced on a few social networks.

What’s new?

The 0.5 roadmap is now complete and here comes Movim 0.5 “Snowball”! We thank our contributors who help make Movim a great project.

• The default theme has been completely revamped by Edhelas. This is of course important for first contact and to improve usage.
• You will now be able to connect to your existing XMPP account! If you try using a third party XMPP server, keep in mind that the Movim server will need to be configured to use a publicly open BOSH proxy.
• Movim instances now have a public API that let others know whether it’s up and a few statistics like the number of users and the version number. This is used by the website pod.movim.eu which lists instances (if you registers yours there).
• New convenient features have appeared, such as human dates like “two minutes ago”, the ability to change status, add comments to posts, upload avatars to your profile, manage groups etc.

Most of the bugs that were reported have been fixed. Keep on giving us bugs and we’ll thank you!

About the website

Movim.eu has been updated too:

• Graphical overhaul, clearer, simpler and more direct
• Having a multilingual website was a major headache, so it was decided to only keep English, French and German. Movim itself remains as internationalized as possible though.
• Less tabs in the navigation bar. The planet’s feed is also used as news feed on the homepage.

Blog.movim.eu as been updated as well:

• Switch to WordPress to ease maintenance and SEO. The RSS feed’s URL has been changed as a result. Make sure it works on your agregator!
• Clean up in the articles, official posts are now in English only, the maintenance of a multilingual blog being an absolute nightmare.
• We chose to let volunteers translate and relay our official blog posts on their own blogs, thus involving the community and giving us more time to code.

RMLL

Our team will be at the LSM (aka RMLL) this year in Geneva from the 7^th July 2012 to the 13^th July. We will also be giving a conference on the 10^th July 2012 at 14:40 in the Uni Mail R290 room. We also have a permanent stand at table 19 in zone 1 for the whole event. Come and say hi!

Try it!

» Download and install Movim
» Try Movim by yourself

Our blog is now synchronised whith StatusNet (@Movim) and Twitter (@MovimNetwork), with Twitter replicating StatusNet. Those two microblogging have the advantage of bringing news to you and we count on you to relay our announcements! It’s also a way to interact with you directly and to make more people aware of our project.

To feed our blog monthly, we exchange regularly on the official Mailing-List. This allows us to keep track of what happens and gives you the opportunity to intervene in our discussions. We welcome every opinion, so don’t hesitate to give yours. When anything important is discussed on the Mailing List, we will write an article on this blog.

The Jabber chatroom movim@conference.movim.eu will of course always be available to talk with the community in real time. You can pop in to ask questions, let us know about your nodes, and anything else that doesn’t fit on the Mailing List.

Finally we opened our Flattr account, the first donation platform we offer you to support us. This will pay our domain names, which are currently in the care of Edhelas and Etenil.

http://movim.eu/

Vincent – Communication Officer

Those of you who use Movim regularly probably noticed some bugs, here are some that this version 0.4.1 fixes:

• language switching issues
• too many constraints on passwords
• jabber disconnections

We encourage you to accelerate the development by reporting bugs. For this, log in to Launchpad and write a bug report.

This new release contains the following improvements:

• A very big bug was fixed on the session stability. It affected the identifiers of the BOSH session. For more details, have a look here.
• Many widgets have been rewritten and cleaned up to benefit from the latest improvements in the widgets’API.
• A lot of work was done on the cache, almost all data from the XMPP server are now copied in the database so the end users’session is always persistent, even after a rough page reload.
• The roster (contacts list) was rewritten so as to reorganise it and make it clearer. Contacts are now sorted by status, clicking on a contact opens up his profile, and clicking on the small bubble next to the name opens up a chat window.
• The chat was improved and now caches the last 20 messages. It also indicates when the contact is composing a new message.
• A lot of work was done on the feeds, and we implemented the Microblogging XEP. Users can now write and send messages on their feeds and read their contacts’feeds and comments instantly.

And many new features were added:

• The avatars are now processed with the GD library, then cached in the web browser for several hours. This way the pages generated by Movim are only a few kB of HTML code ; the CSS and javascript code are also cached in the browser.
• Movim now supports account creation on both the node and the XMPP server. The implementation handles many error cases and notifies the user as to what problem was encountered while creating the account (existing username, weak password etc.).
• When a new message is receive in Movim and the page is in the background, a [1] is prepended to the page title, and an HTML5 notification (soon to be standardised) is emitted. Firefox users need to intall this add-on to benefit from this feature.
• Two small patches allow Movim to be installed on HTTPS-only servers and to communicate with the XMPP server through a proxy.

You can find more details on the 0.4 roadmap.

Finally, the page pod.movim.eu was created to list all known Movim servers on which you can create an account an try the software in a couple of clicks.

You can download this new release over there.

Have fun!

Vincent: etenil, Who are you?

etenil: I am two different persons. Guillaume has been a professional web developer for four years, he lives in London and is 27 years old. He got to know the Free Software philosophy by seeing weird mentions about “GNU” in is first distro (mandrake), and has been a Free Software activist ever since, and the FSF member #6635 . Etenil is a smug Unix user who lives in a cave somewhere with EMACS and keeps a whip with him.

Vincent: When did you join?

etenil: More than a year ago, but gitorious won’t tell me the exact date :/. I read a piece of news about Diaspora that also mentioned Movim, so I popped up on the chatroom but there wasn’t much activity there. I went back a month later and I saw there was no change. By chatting with one of the users, I discovered that there was only one inexperienced developer. At the time I had other projects of my own, but my profile was too useful to movim for me to ignore, so I contacted Edhelas and told him straight-away “Now there’s two of us.”, and here I am.

Vincent: What is you role within the project?

etenil: I am one of the two core developers of Movim. Since I have some experience in middleware thanks to my project of PHP framework, I naturally took on the project’s structure and I’m quite the grease monkey of the team.

I also applied my past experience for the project’s logicstics, for instance by defining release procedures and quality checks during the merge process so that the code has always been read by at least two persons.

I’m also the official whipper of the project and custodian of Movim’s standard issue nailed whip in order to punish developers that produce bad code .

Vincent: The project has evolved a lot in a rather short time. How do you see Movim’s future?

etenil: This is a complex question. Movim has indeed progressed a lot faster than what I expected, but we often face issues from technical constraints that come from our choices (e.g. PHP and XMPP), I think we’ll make it eventually, but it’ll take a lot longer than if we had written our own protocol from scratch.

But Movim isn’t a typical project. Technical superiority won’t be enough in the long run, and we need to benefit from a network effect so as to attract a critical mass of users for the project to live on. Eventually it will come down to a communication battle rather than technical. Fortunately, we have a very fine communication manager who does a great job .

Vincent: Decentralized social network projects are blossomin all over the Internet nowadays. As a developer, what advice would you give to improve interoperability?

etenil: Interoperability won’t be a problem. The fact is that no one wishes to inter-operate. Projects that chose to roll their own protocol won’t want to change to a more generic and more complex one like XMPP. And adding extra protocols would prove a heavy work and their maintenance nightmarish for developers who don’t care much for other protocols.

In my opinion, Movim can just use XMPP gateways, this way we won’t have to worry about other protocols at all. But we have to be aware that eventually the de facto standard will be that of the biggest project.

I also think that we should have an optimistic view of all this. We all are Free projects and share the same goals. So there’s no real competition. It’s better to see it as a big melting pot of experimental social networks out of which the best one will appear. Diversity has always been a great strength of Free software no matter what some people think, and all this activity is very healthy.

Vincent: What desktop environment do you use every day?

etenil: I’ve liked XFCE since the first time I tried, but GNOME2 was very very good, so I never stayed with XFCE. Fortunately, GNOME3 gave me the perfect excuse to final get down to it. Please note that Linus Torvalds copied on me about this .

Vincent: Thanks a lot for your time .

Vincent: My name’s Vincent, I’m 20 and a linux user for a year and a half now. I have a few projects of my own and a blog. I’m a third-year IT student. The 98% of Internet users – which I was still a part of not so long ago – who haven’t had a taste of Free software have no idea of what the remaining 2% are able to do. And it really changes one’s day to day life.

Etenil: How did you get to know Movim?

Vincent: I first came across Movim when it only started. I don’t quite remember how (I still used Windows back then), perhaps just by looking around.

Etenil: What is it that motivated you to contribute to Movim?

Vincent: Honestly? Edhelas! I’ve been waiting for Movim for a very long time. When I write articles about it, Edhelas always requested help to advance the project’s translations. Unlike this summer, I really didn’t have time back then. So a midday, I popped up on the website, saw the languages list and I thought to myself `Alright, how could I get languages from so many countries translated?”. I had the idea of going to get contributions myself on linux forums of two of the biggest communities for each country on the list, then I posted the same message describing the project and our needs. Contributions soon started to flood in. It’s pretty simple actually, if Movim get referenced abroad, we are likely to get more contributors and the project grows faster!

Etenil: What is your position in the projet exactly?

Vincent: I’m in charge of the communication, that is I’m maintaining the website, I advertise the project, I manage the referecing/SEO, I keep up to date with what blogs write about Movim so we can answer all requests. Obviously, I’m also pushing the translations It’s really exciting to be the link between the community, the contributors and the core developers.

Etenil: Are you a Facebook user?

Vincent: Not anymore for a year now, I closed my account. Nevertheless, I had to re-open a private account that only contains my family members who have given up on any other form of digital communication. It’s sad to have to choose between your convictions and what reality forces onto you. Fortunately, because Facebook uses XMPP, I can talk with them by only using Gajim. I don’t want to lose contact, but I really hope I can introduce them to something better in the near future.

Etenil: What do you think Movim lacks to be as appealing as facebook?

Vincent: I’m not sure the question is relevant; on the one hand, most users ask for games an silly applications, on the other a smaller number of people expects really useful features like audio calls, video conferencing, or that we surprise them with the many unexploited features of the XMPP protocol. Movim is expected to do everything, a sort of mixture between Skype, Facebook, Twitter and PiratePad!

Etenil: You’re new to the project, what do you think of the team?

Vincent: It’s a brilliant small team! Actually it’s human-sized, I mean by this that it’s like a family: we argue, we laugh, we work, we take decisions and we wish each other good night together. That’s a bit exggerated, but it’s great to be able to work with people who follow ideals we draw all our motivation from. We can barely feel the age difference .

Etenil: To finish, what’s your favourite text editor?

Vincent: Kate (which I miss, since I’m now using Ubuntu).

Etenil: Thank you for your time, and I wish you all the best with us!

This third snapshot in our development process showed up the usual number of unexpected bugs. We need your bug reports and have set up a demo node for you to test movim:

Demo : http://etenil.net/movim/

Login : movim@etenil.thruhere.net

Password : movim

We are now busy defining the roadmap for Movim 0.4 as our post-release stage, so it’s important to us to list the maximum number of bugs at this time.

Contributing is easy: just try our demo and let us know if you find a bug. Then fill in a bug report explaining what you did, what happened and what you expected on the following website:

http://codingteam.net/project/movim/bugs/?order=id:desc

Thanks a lot for your help!

Most notably amongst the new features, we have added support for MySQL, so far Movim was only able to use SQLite, and this is a great improvement on the performance side. The enabler for this was the introduction of Storage, an abstracted database interface that implements the Active Record pattern. It allows us to easily manipulate data without caring about the back-end; the common operations are available with simple methods like save().

Storage is a backend-agnostic storage engine that was designed specially for Movim. It implements the Active Query pattern. Currently it supports both SQLite and MySQL.

I point you to Etenil’s post for more details.

It is now possible to have multiple conversations in Movim, through the new tabbed chat widget. This update opens up a tab automatically if a contact talks to you. It also stays synchronized if you refresh the page, so that your tabs stay open. Nice isn’t it?

Here is Edhelas’post for more info and a screenshot.

Clicking on a contact’s avatar now brings up the profile page, which contains the new Feed tab. This tab is not yet fully implemented, but will soon be displaying your contact’s microblogging feed, a sort of “wall”. And you’ll also be able to access it from other clients like Jappix!

Changelog:

• Unsupported browsers blocking
• Input checks at login
• New Chat widget (with tabs)
• Added Storage
• Added MySQL support
• Added contacts list display
• Adding and deletion of contacts
• Added status support
• Added status text update
• Added profiles (vcard)
• Added profile editing
• Added basic microblogging implementation (pubsub)
• Added a better logging system dedicated to Movim

Movim 0.3′s roadmap was not respected. There has been some delays (as usual) and some features required a lot more work than planned. From now on, the roadmap will be kept up to date by our new member: Vincent.

You can find the temporary roadmap to Movim 0.4 on our wiki.

See you in two months!

Our version numbering scheme is in fact very simple. It all comes down from our programming method. After each release, we schedule a development meeting in the public room movim-private@muc.jappix.com. The team members list the goals that they wish to reach for the future release, then these are assessed and the most critical ones are retained for the next Movim release.

Another criterion in the choice of goals is the development rhythm. The allocation of work is designed to fit into a one month period, and we target a 1 to 2 months release date (allowing for unexpected delays). The reason such a short development cycle is it is very motivating to see our work getting released, and we need to feel the community is there at each release and that are work is expected. Without regular releases, our team would have given up long ago.

We don’t use the alpha, beta etc. release model because each release of the 0.x series is a snapshot of the status of Movim taken after a successful mini-roadmap completion.

Movim’s numbering scheme is likely to change after Movim will have passed the 1.0 milestone, where we will also be concerned with maintaining older versions that are stable.