New Year, New Work So, what's new for ForgeFed in 2025? The previous NLnet grant is about to close (we had an extension but I'm happy to say we've used all the funding we received) We're about to sign the new grant, which is going to have a slightly different focus than before: User research, gather the needs of forge federation developers Figure out a path to get some…
Concept Before we begin: As always, my task board is available. It seems some disk space problem is taking apart my VPS, including the SSL certs, so you might get a warning about them being expired. I'm starting to wonder if it's a good idea for me to find an arrangement where someone else manages the services that I use. Like, I still want Nextcloud etc. etc. all the self-hosted appps I…
Data Migration Before we begin: As always, my task board is available. Data migration, in this context, is my ability as the user, to copy or move my data from one server to another server on the network. Often in web applications this service isn't offered, and causes what's often called vendor lock-in : I'm stuck with the server I chose, and whoever is managing and hosting it.…
Good news: Vervis now has a Docker build, including a prebuilt image you can use to deploy a Vervis instance really easily! I never used Docker before, but I'm happy to say it was really easy to learn. The biggest challenge I had was the slow process of debugging, as Docker was rebuilding Vervis again and again from scratch only to find an error near the end. The image can be found here:…
Stressful Times Wow, two months passed since my last post. Two exhausting, but also exciting, months of working on something entirely new and different: An actor programming library. It took much more time than I hoped, and of course it's just the beginning, but I'm so relieved now that I have some results to show. I'll be honest with you: I depend financially on the funding from…
Until now, publishing a new resource, whether it's a comment or a project, has been happening only locally, on the user's home server. It means that whoever wanted to implement a ForgeFed-federated forge, would need to host the implementations of all actor/resource/service types on one domain name, acting as a big all-in-one forge. This is no longer the case! And that's…
The previous posts described project nesting and team nesting. So at that point, it was possible to: Create projects with components in them Create project hierarchies Create teams Create team hierarchies Add collaborators/members to projects/components/teams There are still details to polish, of course (e.g. how to link a Repository with its PatchTracker ), but the core…
The previous post was about project nesting. Most of what I said there probably applies to team nesting as well, and the implementation of team nesting reuses the same mechanism. The next step, connecting teams and projects, is going to be big. But today I'll talk about this in-between step: Team nesting. As always, my task board is available! Organizational Structure Every organization has…
As always, my task board is available. I use the Vikunja app to track my work, it's not a static page and requires JS. And sometimes can be a bit buggy and needs a reload. You know what? Let me just show you. Nesting I haven't used GitLab lately, and I don't use GitHub (other than for examining its UI). But unless some huge change happened, that I missed, the following features are…
So far, we've mostly been playing here with Ticket Trackers and Projects. Teams are now joining the OCAP game as well. After the words there's a visual demo as well. Take a look at my task board (and the previous blog posts) for more context while reading. Access Management Overview The ForgeFed specification and the Vervis implementation have had 2 pieces of the access management…
It's been 5 months since the previous blog post! Much longer than I hoped. The features I've been working on proved to be much more complex to implement, than I anticipated. With the frustration and exhaustion building up, I kept working in small chunks, and the result is finally here. After all the many words below there's a demo as well. Take a look at my task board for more…
Vervis has already had for a while the ability to add collaborators to resources (repos, issue trackers, PR trackers). However: There's been no visible UI for it There's been only one role: Admin Due to the actor refactoring, all federation code has needed porting to the new actor system, otherwise it wouldn't work anymore There's been no way to remove collaborators, only to…
The previous blog post discussed the actor system refactoring work. I've built into Vervis the foundations for actor programming, and started porting Activity handlers to this new system. Then, I moved on to my next task, which is about stabilizing ForgeFed's Object Capability system. ForgeFed Stability The ForgeFed specification has been evolving for a few years now. Much less…
For the last 2 months, I've been working on a major refactoring of the Vervis codebase. I'm switching the architecture and code structure from a traditional RESTful web API model into a networked actor model . I'm very excited about it, because it's about much much more than just refactoring code: It's about creating a new kind of application . And it's about the…
It's time for ForgeFed to have a blog! We'll be writing here about our progress working on forge federation.