Dear all,
last weekend the openZIM team held its Developers Meeting for 2010. We
planned to have two Developers Meeting per year, one in spring, one in
fall. But as there were too many events in and around spring and all of
us are volunteers we decided to better spend this weekend with our
families. So this was our first and only Developers Meeting in 2010.
Participants:
* Emmanuel Engelhard (Kiwix maintainer and organizer of this meeting)
* Tommi Mäkitalo (openZIM main developer)
* Christian Pühringer (WikiOnBoard maintainer)
* Ralf Schmitt (developer of Pediapress)
* Manuel Schneider
== Collections Extension for MediaWiki / Pediapress ==
Ralf from Pediapress visited us on Saturday to discuss with us the
integration of the ZIM format into their Collections extension which is
used on Wikimedia wikis to create books (printed on demand or exported
as PDF or ODF). This idea was born on the Wikimedia Conference in April
2010 when we had a Wikipedia Offline meeting.
Tommi and Ralf exchanged thoughts about the implementation, Tommi made
some changes to the zimwriter to make it more modular while Ralf wrote a
Python wrapper for zimlib. In a test program Ralf was able to create his
first ZIM file using Python and the new modularized zimwriter.
While Pediapress is in touch with the Wikimedia Foundation in order to
make a project with them for the integration of ZIM into their software
Ralf agreed to at least finish the test program in Python which can be
downloaded here:
http://github.com/schmir/pyzim
We hope that WMF and Pediapress come to an agreement so the actual
integration can happen soon.
== Documentation of the ZIM File Format ==
As we made a lot of changes last year on the ZIM file format the
documentation was partly outdated and partly not detailed enough. We
spent roughly one day to improve the documentation, its size has doubled
during this weekend.
A few parts of the format, notably the URL scheme and encoding, native
category handling, per-article meta data and the HTML layout was not
properly specified, so we spend some time to discuss the details and fix
these issues. They need to be implemented now, maybe the last major
changes to the ZIM format, but these changes don't break compatibility
as they were already prepared in the past.
Another addition to the format - a new idea, but also
backward-compatible - was the checksum. Newer ZIM files can now be
checked by the new zimlib if they are corrupted. This was a request from
users in Peru which have a hard time to download ZIM files and as they
often have to resume transfers the files are likely to get corrupted. As
they still work in most parts but cause errors in specific situations
only it was hard to tell what the problem was.
http://openzim.org/ZIM_File_Format
== Reader Applications ==
News on specific readers, this is not a list of all available reader
applications.
=== Windows / Linux ===
Kiwix is already wellknown and works perfectly on both GNU/Linux and
Windows. It is a GUI application - a browser - to view ZIM files and
also features a webserver to view ZIM in a network using a standard browser.
Emmanuel's roadmap is to create big ZIM files in the next months
including all images for the selected articles. The next WP 1.0 release
will be produced soon, the selection process is almost done. He bought a
new server to do that, partly sponsored by Wikimedia Italia. The biggest
effort is to create and optimize all the thumbnails of the images, so he
is now trying to get a server at the datacenter of the Wikimedia
Foundation where he can read the image files directly from the repositories.
http://www.kiwix.org/index.php/Main_Page
=== Symbian / Android ===
This year Christian published WikiOnBoard, a Symbian application to view
ZIM files. It works very well on recent Nokia phones. On Sunday
Christian presented us WikiOnBoard on Android - after he was able to get
Qt installed on Android WikiOnBoard can be compiled on Android without
any porting.
The plan is to implement a touch screen GUI to WikiOnBoard, so it can be
used on never Nokia phones and on Android devices. The current version
of WikiOnBoard only works with a keyboard which becomes less and less
common. Once this is done WikiOnBoard will be published in the Nokia Ovi
Store and Android market.
Christian asked for sponsorship for a new touch screen phone (about 150
EUR plus the help to get it via Germany as it is not available yet in
many other countries). As the openZIM budget offers enough room for this
it only depends on the team to approve this sponsorship.
http://wiki.github.com/cip/WikiOnBoard/
== MediaWiki API interface for zimwriter ==
Emmanuel and Tommi want to write a proof-of-concept of a zimwriter
interface which uses the MediaWiki API directly to get all articles out
of a wiki.
== ZIM File Library ==
We want to start working on our ZIM File library to make it easier for
users to fine ZIM files.
This involves finding mirror sites and writing a download page which
reads ZIM meta data, shows a searchable list of files and redirects
downloads to the mirror servers.
== Events in 2011 ==
=== Developers Meeting ===
August 2nd / 3rd
We decided to have the next and only openZIM meeting in 2011 during the
Hacking Days which are prior Wikimania 2011 in Haifa, Israel.
Asuming that we will be able to get the same sponsorship as this year we
agreed that in this case will reimburse travel costs for this meeting in
Israel.
Registration to Wikimania will start in January, Manuel will send a
notification to the openZIM mailing list. Everyone interested is urged
to register and pay as soon as possible, as there will be a decent early
bird discount and accommodation is part of the registration. Then
everyone should book a flight. The receipts and invoices for
registration and the flights will then go to Manuel who will take care
of the reimbursement.
=== LinuxTag ===
May 11th - 14th
As always LinuxTag will take place in Berlin and we will be part of it.
We plan to have one or two talks about openZIM, Tommi will do again a
live-coding session to show how to use zimlib while Emmanuel offered a
talk about the steps of how to create an offline version of Wikipedia,
explaining selection, code cleanups, link rewriting etc.
== End ==
Ok, that's it. Quite a long report, but we actually did a lot of work
during these two days. Additionally it is always very valuable to speak
face-to-face and get to know new team members.
This last year was not as active concerning features and development as
last year, but I consider it being a great progress nevertheless - this
year we were able to stabilize the format, get the implementation and
documentation right and reach out for new users such as Pediapress or
WikiOnBoard.
The next year we will have to
* finish the last open items concerning implementation
* get the mobile readers released to the official markets / app stores
* get the toolchains between MediaWiki and ZIM running, such as
Collections extension and the MW API interface
Pictures: See here
http://openzim.org/Developer_Meetings/2010-2
Thanks for the participants to be there and help getting the work done
and to Wikimedia CH as our generous sponsor to make this possible.
Thank you for your attention,
Manuel Schneider
--
Regards
Manuel Schneider
Wikimedia CH - Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens
Wikimedia CH - Association for the advancement of free knowledge
www.wikimedia.ch