OpenAppJS Project Update - September

New Developers!

The biggest news is that other developers have become interested in the project:

• Mikey's going to help out Benjamin Lupton with the interconnect project and possibly align it making use use openappjs components.

• We were also contacted last week by Ethan, David and Rylan from Colab.coop (a social enterprise service company similar to Enspiral and based in New York ). They use loomio and are very interested in cobudget. They had also been thinking along very similar lines of a suite of apps running off an opensourced microservice API's. They want to get a project reporting app up and running quite quickly, and will focus on the existing people + groups + [reports? + projects?] APIs.

Welcome to openapp! We look forward to the new energy and ideas these folks bring!

Logistics:

Mikey has returned to the States but continues to work on openappjs and has also been helping out on cobudget.

I've taken on a 30hr/week contract with Twingl to pay the bills and keep working on openapp outside of this. Their trailblazer project has some similar UI ideas as the openapp data browser ui. I have some freedom to pursue interesting ideas in the trailblazer frontend so I'm hoping to take these learnings and apply them to openapp later on.

Craftodex (people data browser for Enspiral Craftworks):

Craftodex will be our first attempt to combine the people API service with openappjs UI components. The plan is the this will eventually be able to browse all kinds of open- linked-data out there on the web (e.g. http://dbpedia.org) using user-friendly semantic search,and customisable view options.

To this end we've been building up tiny UI pieces in the OpenAppJS repos that we will combine into apps (you can see how this works here

The goals of this project are:

• Build out full set of UI components following the ARIA spec. Eventually making composing a frontend app as easy as writing a schema.

• Appeal to js developers and get them interested in openApp. To this end we're using the mercury frontend framework. Mercury is a highly performant and scalable framework but could do with some more examples and better documentation By building our components in mercury we help the nascent mercury community get off the ground and give them some working reference examples.

  • We're thinking of licensing things in a Peer-production license and stir up these developers and get them thinking about alternative economic models that support open-source developers directly (rather than just working for big corporate and doing open-source on the side).
  • Test out hypothesis that users find a federated semantic search across multiple providers valuable.
  • Test the hypothesis that users find browsing data in a 'network view' (rather than just the prevalent 'list view') valuable.
  • Provide Craftworks with somewhere to find contact information about our rapidly expanding team :).