Posts Tagged ‘diaspora’

GSoC 2011: Videochat for Diaspora*

Tuesday, August 30th, 2011

I’m writing about the results achieved with my Google Summer of Code project, for the Ninux community, under the umbrella of Freifunk (I thank them both for the opportunity they gave me).

Briefly it consisted in developing a video chat feature for Diaspora*, a distributed social network.

This project has received a very big feedback and appreciations from the entire Diaspora community, including the core team, who helped and supported me during the development.

Basically, it provides two new functionalities to the Diaspora engine:

  • Textual chat, based on XMPP signaling protocol
  • Video chat, using Jingle XEP
Both have been developed in Javascript, with some Rails code. It uses Strophe.js library for the textual chat, based on XMPP Over BOSH standard, and a self-made extension of it to realize Jingle protocol.
The project includes a custom ejabberd module in Erlang for the integration of ejabberd/diaspora databases, an Actionscript part for the video chat stuff and an external authentication script written in Ruby used by ejabberd to authenticate users from Diaspora.
The project has been split in two pull requests, and we’re currently fixing them before merge with master repository: [1],  [2].

Source code can be found at https://github.com/vcuculo/diaspora, under “jabber” and “video_chat” branches.

Setup instructions here. Some screen-shots: [1], [2], [3].

I hope it will be soon merged and improved by me and the community, to make it available on every Diaspora* pod!

Vittorio

GSOC 2011: RadioMate

Monday, August 29th, 2011

The Ninux community, under the umbrella of Freifunk, developed four awesome open-source projects for the Google Summer of Code program 2011: a front-end for RadioMate, a new mapserver (called nodeshot), a video and chat extension to the social networking engine Diaspora* and a new tunneling tool.

In this post I will write about RadioMate, the project I was involved in. Then posts on the other projects will follow!

There are many web-radio projects that are closely involved in the world of Community Networks: in Rome Fusoradio and Radio Sonar are an active part of the community and relay on the ninux network for their streaming, in Leipzig Radio Blau (which transmits also in FM) gives big spaces to the Freifunk project, or RadioCona in Ljubljana, where the Wlan Slovenija project is based.

Often these web radios have to relay on closed-source software platforms as the available open-source solutions don’t fit their needs.

RadioMate is a free (as in freedom) community-wise Web-radio management system. Some of its features are:

  • support of multiple users with different privileges (roles)
  • easy radio schedule management
  • handling of audio files and playlists
  • extendable with new types of transmissions
  • interface with the icecast server
  • takeover of the radio streaming in case of “special editions”

While last year the RadioMate engine was developed, this year our efforts focused on a Web frontend. You can find a demo at radiomate.ninux.org. The username is “foobar” while the password is “secret”. Point also your player (e.g. VLC) at radiomate.ninux.org:8000.

For the techies, the engine is based on liquidsoap, written in Python, and easily extendable through liquidsoap scripts. It exports a JSON API which is exploited by the Javascript (jQuery) based Web frontend. Source code and documentation can be found at radiomate.org.

Of course there is still work to do, but I hope that this software will be soon used by our friends running webradios!

As we say in Rome:Daje!
Clauz