Archive for the ‘ufrgs’ Category

ISS at FISL 10

Monday, June 8th, 2009

The 10th edition of the FISL (International Free Software Forum) will be held at Porto Alegre, Brazil on June 24-27th. Last year the FISL had nearly 7500 participants, thus it’s one of the biggest Free Software events in the world. It’s a great honor to know that this event debuted about 10 years ago as a joint effort between local organizations, companies and universities (including our beloved UFRGS). This shows the strength of open source and free software in this region.

I’m glad to announce that the Instant Syndicating Standards project was selected from over 600 applicants. We will be presenting on the 25th at 9AM. Other Drupal related projects will also be presented (check the full schedule). By the way, FISL’s site is powered by Drupal and the artwork is beautiful!

Posted in drupal, iss, ufrgs | No Comments »

Web Desktop Shared Session

Tuesday, November 20th, 2007

I’ve been working at UFRGS building the next generation Web Desktop to help chemical engineers work collaboratively.

During my research, it was a pleasant surprise for me to stumble upon Ext from Jack Slocum, and notably the work done by Todd Murdock concerning the Start Menu.

Another remarkable work is from my friend Massimiliano Mirra called SamePlace, and notably the concept of XML Sync Islands created by Domenico De Felice.

Currently, the concept of XML Sync Islands has been developed to work over XMPP, but the same concept may work over the Web with the help of AJAX. What this means is that all the cool stuff being built by Massimiliano may find their way into the Web.

I’m building the idea of “Shared Session” into the system. From Todd’s menu I’m calling different services. Each service is loaded in a window. A user may save a session for later retrieval or he might share a session with another user. When a user shares a session, this is what happens: he closes a window, his colleague sees the window being closed. His colleague opens a service, he sees the window being opened. And using the concept of XML Sync Islands, the interaction between the users are even richer. In fact, they are the same ones experienced by users using SamePlace.

Of course SamePlace makes everything just more beautiful and responsive since it brings XMPP to the Firefox browser. It would be neat if browsers had native support for XMPP. Perhaps some day the Mozilla Foundation will recognize Massimilano’s work and other browsers will follow.

Posted in extjs, itop, sameplace, ufrgs | 1 Comment »

UFRGS’ Social Network

Friday, November 16th, 2007

We are currently building UFRGSWeb, UFRGS‘ rich-media social network, to be launched next year. UFRGS is one of the largest universities in Brazil, with over 40.000 people. Being so large, it’s difficult to be aware of all the interesting research being developed at the university. Our goal is to provide students and professors with tools that will help them discover and share information with colleagues and society. To achieve this goal, we are creating a symbioses of Orkut and YouTube from an academic perspective. We are adopting the ISS open standard so that information may be discovered, syndicated and aggregated easily. The system is being built on top of Drupal, an excellent open source content management system. I’m very happy to be part of this project and to being able to contribute back to my university and to society. I think this is a very important project that will help improve the quality of education and research at UFRGS with phenomenal cascading effects.

Posted in drupal, iss, ufrgs, ufrgsweb | No Comments »