PHP.net.my Group An Interview with MyMeeting Senior Developer

[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sat, 27 Sep 2008 23:42:53 -0700

An Interview with MyMeeting Senior Developer

Original link
http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2008/09/an-interview-wi.html
Posted by ditesh on Saturday, 27 September 2008 at 02:42 AM

Backup
http://oscc-mampu.blogspot.com/2008/09/interview-with-mymeeting-senior.html

MyMeeting ( http://knowledge.oscc.org.my/solution-areas/application/mymeeting
) (download http://trac.oscc.org.my/mymeeting/wiki/Download) is a web
application specifically designed to help better manage meetings in
government agencies. Initially developed at the Open Source Competency
Center http://www.oscc.org.my/ (OSCC), it is the first Malaysian
government software to be released publicly under the open source BSD
license.

We conducted an email interview with Abdullah Zainul Abidin (
http://blog.abdullahsolutions.com/ ), the senior developer on this
project. The answers are below verbatim (with some minor formatting
changes).

0) Tell us the story of how MyMeeting came about being developed.
Who's brainchild was this? Who were the key developers? How many
developers were allocated to work on MyMeeting? Was there management
buy-in before development started? Was the development of MyMeeting
conducted in OSS manner (ie open mailing lists, bug tracking software,
public access to SVN/CVS/git etc)?

MyMeeting actually started life as a custom system for the management
of decisions made in the GITIC committee. GITIC (Government
Information Technology And Internet Committee) is a committee chaired
by the Chief Secretary Of Malaysia that discusses the implementation
of government IT policies and so it has members from every government
agency in Malaysia.

Once the GITIC system was complete, MAMPU saw that MyMeeting could
actually be useful to other government agencies too thus most of the
customized for GITIC portion was taken and turned into settings which
could easily be changed by the various agencies for their use. Then it
wasn't really open source yet. We were using all the open source
technologies (PHP, MySQL, Apache, SVN) but the development wasn't
really open for all to see.

It was when we wanted to redo MyMeeting for MyMeeting version 2 that
we saw MyMeeting is a perfect candidate for a completely Malaysian
Government Open Source Software project. Most probably the first of
it's kind. So yes, development of MyMeeting is conducted in OSS
manner. You can access the bugtracker at http://trac.oscc.org.my/mymeeting,
download it through svn at https://svn.oscc.org.my/mymeeting, register
to it's mailing list at
http://lists.oscc.org.my/mailman/listinfo/mymeeting-users
and also edit it's wiki at the knowledge bank
http://knowledge.oscc.org.my/solution-areas/application/mymeeting.

1) MyMeeting was developed on CakePHP ( http://cakephp.org/ ). What
was the reasoning to choose CakePHP over other PHP frameworks? Did
using an ROR-style framework help speed up development? Were there any
problems faced when using CakePHP and how did the developers go about
solving the problems?

The reason we choose CakePHP was exactly because it was an ROR-style
( http://www.rubyonrails.org/ ) framework. At the time when we decided
to redo MyMeeting, there was a suggestion that we should use ROR
especially after we saw Kamal's presentation on ROR (
http://www.slideshare.net/kamal.fariz/web-development-with-ruby-on-rails-mygosscon-2007
) at MyGOSSCON ( http://mygosscon.oscc.org.my/ ).

But I was worried about the learning curve that we would have to face
and also considering the limited amount of time we have it was just
not realistic to expect all of the OSCC developers to grasp a
completely new language (none of us have any kind of experience with
Ruby) and a completely new approach to web application development. I
mean doing programming with the MVC concept after so long of mixed PHP
and HTML hackery it certainly is very different. But I knew that we
would not be able to go far with "traditional" way of developing php
software. We have to overcome MVC.

So we choose CakePHP because it was marketed as clone of ROR. The
initial learning curve of a new approach was pretty steep but once
that was all over we find that it did help speed up development as it
keeps things clean. Everyone knew where things need to go and where to
look if there are problems.

2) Is there any plans to officially support PostgreSQL (and other free
databases) in future versions of MyMeeting? Also, why the support for
MySQL only in this release?

There is no "official" plans to support PostgreSQL and actually
cakephp does support other free and non-free databases. Only there are
some queries which we had to hack in as they are too complex for
CakePHP. And to be honest we haven't had much experience with other
databases. So if someone really needs it, or even gave us the patch to
support it (hint,hint ;) we'd be more than glad to implement it into
the main tree of MyMeeting.

3) Has there been any patches fed back from the FOSS community? If
members of the FOSS community are interested in contributing to this
project, where should they go to information on getting involved?

We had one patch submitted by SuMarDi ( http://twitter.com/sumardi )
that actually changed the theme of MyMeeting. It was really good. But
as of date (11/09/2008) we have not yet put it in because he also
changed some tags in the views so we need to make sure we don't break
anything if we put it in. Apart from that we've got some good feedback
from angch ( http://twitter.com/angch ) and he even updated the wiki
in Trac.

We welcome any contribution and involvement from the community
regarding MyMeeting. If anyone is interested they should first
register themselves at the OSCC Knowledgebank ( http://knowledge.oscc.org.my
) and from there they can read up on the latest MyMeeting
documentation (
http://knowledge.oscc.org.my/solution-areas/application/mymeeting
).

They should download the source code and try out MyMeeting (the
Knowledgebank would have information on how to do that). If they find
some bugs or would like to suggest some feature they can do so at the
mymeeting trac site ( http://trac.oscc.org.my/mymeeting ) by logging
in with their Knowledgebank account.

They should also register with the mymeeting-users mailing list to
keep up with the latest happenings with mymeeting at
http://lists.oscc.org.my/mailman/listinfo/mymeeting-users . Apart from
that, sometimes the mymeeting developers can be found in the #oscc irc
channel on freenode. We'd be glad to help in any way we can so that
the community can contribute.

4) Are there plans to integrate into existing legacy calendaring
systems? Are there plans to integrate into FOSS calendaring software?
How about integrating into existing proprietary calendaring software?

We have a vague plan of exporting the meeting calendars with iCal or
something. But that is still a long way to go in the pipeline.

5) What is the roadmap for future releases of MyMeeting?

We haven't got a lot of feedback from the community yet as of where we
should be heading. So most of it is only in the developers head of
what next we should do. Yeah.. we're still very new at managing an
open source project. It should be in trac.. :P

6) Why was the decision to keep MyMeeting development within OSCC
before version 1.0 ?

That was actually the default way of doing things here at OSCC. We're
actually trying to introduce something new with MyMeeting version 2
with it being completely open source and all.

7) Will future projects appear to the public prior to v1.0?

That would have to depend on the management.. :)

8) How is the team adapting to releasing the code?

We were pretty nervous at first. Not knowing whether our codes were
any good and all. But we're okay now. Still got a long way to go to be
fully disciplined in the open source way thought (release control and
all) but insyaAllah we'll get there.

9) Management must be well educated to have the source code released.
Was this an issue, and did you need advocacy sessions?

We are supposed to be the Open Source COMPETENCY Centre. :) So
management should already know about the advantages of doing it in
open source. We didn't need advocacy sessions.

10) How does your team / Management / OSCC / MAMPU rationalise the
sharing of Intellectual Right of copyright and software patents?

We want Malaysia to be seen as a contributor of knowledge and
technology to the global community.

11) How many seats has this been rolled out to (#Agencies / #Seats)
and how much would this have cost for an equivalent commercial
product?

There is at least around 6 agencies that is actively engaged with us
to use MyMeeting. And since MyMeeting is freely downloadable there
could be more out there that we don't even know of that's using it.
Our current estimate is that it would cost at least RM 100K per agency
to get something like MyMeeting commercially. So that's RM 600K at
least already. :)

12) How much would your team foresee saving the Govt over the next 5
to 10 years from MyMeeting, and other OSCC products?

For MyMeeting? In 5 years maybe more than RM 15 million. If we can get
all (and we mean ALL) of the government agencies and bodies to use
MyMeeting. Not sure about the other products though.

13) Govt is cutting back on spending generally. Do you foresee that it
will cut back on OSS investments?

Actually I think the right way to go is to put in more on OSS
investments if they want to cut back. So I don't think they will.

14) Any new projects from OSCC labs we should look out for?

MySurveillance is rolling out soon. It is a HIDS system based on
Prelude.

15) Can the private sector make use of the applications from OSCC?

Yes of course. But we won't be able to officially provide support
though. We're more focused on government bodies.

16) Will OSCC provide support, or do they have recommended partners?

We would recommend partners wherever possible.

17) There have been cases where proprietary software vendors have
opposed OSS initiatives by the government. Has there been any negative
feedback from these vendors on the release of MyMeeting code, and if
so, what has happened thus far?

No problems so far.

We would like to thank Abdullah Zainul Abidin for his time in
answering the many questions. We are encouraged by the fact that the
Malaysian goverment is moving so far as to open source its software
projects. Indeed, the incredible interest from other government
agencies clearly proves that the open sourcing of MyMeeting was a far-
reaching wise investment. It has clearly allowed for efficient use of
ICT resources by all, not to mention many millions of tax ringgits
that are being saved through the choice of liberal OSS licensing. With
their efforts leading to the promotion of OSS innovation and
creativity, this initiative will surely lead to increased and
sustained growth of the local ICT ecosystem.

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