Open Collaboration Services and KDE Forums

For KDE developers, web-based forums are often uncommon workflows. Indeed, for communication among developers mailing lists are much better tools, especially since you can handle everything inside a client (most of the time), compared to forums where you have to use a web browser. The ways of reading, replying and interacting with posters are dramatically different. And that is why some developers find themselves uncomfortable with the KDE Community Forums.

A dedicated application would be usually much better than a browser, because you can work around the intrinsic limitations of the browser itself. The problem is that you can’t really access a forum with anything else than a browser. That is, it used to be like this, but now things are changing.

In the past months fellow administrator bcooksley has been working quite hard implementing the Open Collaboration Services (OCS) specification in the KDE Community Forums. For the uninformed, it’s the same API that powers OpenDesktop.org and related web pages. This means that you could access the forum contents programmatically using a REST API and parsing the XML that is returned by the service.

Unfortunately, bcooksley had no time to implement a client that would make use of this newly-made service.

That’s where I stepped in. This morning I committed in the kde-forum-mods repository the first implementation of a backend to access the forums’ OCS service. Currently it’s extremely basic - just a few classes to wrap the XML responses into decent data representation, and a basic class to perform reading requests: that means that technically it is possible to request forum listings, thread listing, and posts. I’m still working on the ability of replying and posting messages.

Being a Pythonista, the backend is written entirely in Python: currently it uses the standard library plus dateutil and lxml to do its bidding, but the next steps would be to turn it into a PyKDE4 library to access all the KDE related goodness (hello, KIO!). Bear in mind that currently there is no application using this: I merely completed (part of) the backend.

If you’re interested, the code can be found on gitorious.org, in the ocs-client directory, branch experimental, inside the kde-forum-mods repository.

• forums
• KDE
• OCS
• python