The increase in the production of open source software and the participation of businesses as active community members has resulted in the need of collaborative development tools that integrate resources from various sources and new applications that provide a solution to the type of management that the businesses require.
The EzForge project tackles the definition, development and implementation of a resource integration architecture based on emerging Web 2.0 technologies, which solve the problems of existing forges. The modelling of forge services using REST resources allows an easier, more flexible integration of heterogeneous tools. The employment of thin clients and mash-ups also offer users an easily configurable interface, allowing access to different forges and tools from the same interface. This will provide management of all projects that the user is involved in, independently from the repositories where the projects are located.
EzForge will be based on the EzWeb platform, which is also being developed in the MORFEO open source community.
Architecture
The EzForge architecture consists of three levels which take into account the service access details, the REST resource layer that models the forge and the client mash-up integration layer:
- Service Integration Layer: To transform and give access to backend services and systems (WS*, CORBA, PMI… RPC-Interfaces) providing a standardised view of the systems architecture.
- EzForge Resource Layer: To provide a generic representation of the entire collection of resources, representing all concepts, services, activities, information, relationships, etc. that a Next Generation Forge should have. This layer will access the adaptation layer to obtain, mix and distribute work and activities over different systems. Ez supplies the basic collection of resources (also referred to as the heart of the services) that will allow access to general services that will be able to find a forge (a project, users, bugs, etc.) and a plug-in mechanism to extend the functionality of the forge (messenger, VoIP, wiki, etc.).
- User Interface Layer: Made up of various types of resources that ease human interaction (also known as gadgets). In order to allow integration and to ease the development and reutilization of generic gadgets, this layer will only use functionality given by the EzForge Resource Layer.
Licences
- Software generated by the project will be released under the GPL dual licence.
- The project documentation, including this page, will be managed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 licence.
Funding
The EzForge project is partially funded through the participation of various members of the following projects:
- Vulcano (FIT-350503-2007-7) Singular AVANZA project – funded by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Consumer Affairs. Project members collaborate on Vulcano to provide the EzForge platform as the heart of the Vulcano Forge. Activity 4 of Next Generation Forges will define the forge integration model and develop an EzForge prototype.
- QualiPSo project IP of the 6th Framework Programme - funded by the European Union. TID and URJC participate in Activity 7 “QualiPSo Factory” suggesting EzForge as the User Interface development platform based on Mash-up and REST integration of QualiPSo forge services.
