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I’m in Amsterdam right now, enjoying the techie buzz of XTech and participating in a horizontal study on the relative merits of different jet lag compensation strategies. (I think mconnor is in the placebo group, the poor thing.)

shaver » telepartisanship

Just posted this…

Hi Gang,

I think we’re getting to the point where I feel comfortable starting to show off our social bookmarking extensibility API. Hopefully it’ll be easy to use. Its not finalized but I’m hoping for lots of feedback on how to improve it.

Basically each service supplies an XPCOM component implementing the flockIFavoritesWebService interface and registered with the category manager in the “flock-favorites-web-service” category. Take a look at flockFavoritesWebServiceExample.js for a trivial example.

The idea is that the service is instantiated at start-up. When the service is activated then setFavoritesQueue is called with an nsIFavoritesQueue object. Your object should periodically poll the queue for pending changes and send them to the web service. There’s two more important calls for bookmark synchronization – getSyncRequired (returns if a sync is needed) and getAllFavorites (returns all favorites that are on the web service).

Take a look at flockFavoriteswebServiceDelicious.js for examples of a real, live, mostly-working service.

So there’s a few outstanding issues we’re looking at that I’d appreciate feedback on. I’ve already talked to a few folks about this but I’d like to put it out there for wider discussion.

* How should we handle syncing of collections?
* How should we handle the sign-up experience – extensions need to be able to provide ui to sign up for an account.
* What should the experience be when a user switches services?

I’m sure there are more issues too.

Ian

Here is a hint to build clucene-0.8.13 with VS 2003.
On October 21, 2005 1:42pm jeongkyu said,http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=10887479With the library, I could successfully build flock.

build error in lucene component (on Windows) | Flock

I think Jeong Kyu is the probably the first person out there to build flock outside the company, and now with Robin’s instructions it should be possible for more people to give it a try.

We’re working on bug fixes and community infrastructure at the moment so hopefully we’ll get a new build out there with some of the nastiest stuff you guys are finding fixed and will have the infrastructure (public source control, etc) in place to take contributions too.

On WordPress.com Geoffrey and I are getting more hits than Robert Scoble – Microsoft blogger extraordinare.

itsolivia mac appropriate, yes? im drunk and love new browsers.

starfuck: i can’t believe how awesome flock (the browser ian is building) is!

We’re in the process of doing our first public release of Flock. Its a little rough around the edges, but as they say, release early, release often. And release the source.

Since we’re building off Firefox we’re releasing a couple of tarballs. One that contains our changes to Mozilla’s MPL code, released under the MPL (http://downloads.flock.com/?product=flock-source-0.4.8-mpl) and our original code released under the GPL (http://downloads.flock.com/?product=flock-source-0.4.8-gpl). If you want to build it you’ll also need the FireFox 1.5 beta 2 source release.

I’ve never built it this way, but in theory you can un-tar our two releases over the top of the firefox source and build it like you would any other Mozilla build. We’ve got a developer site on the way at http://www.flock.com/developer/. We’ve got a mailing list and everything!

Oh, and yes, we’ll have a public source repository up really soon – we just have to finish our CVS vs SVN vs Monotone vs Arch vs Codeville vs Darcs flamewar.

Update:

Things that directly derived from Mozilla are still tri-licenced. stict_mpl means in full compatability with inclusion in MPL products, most of those files are tri-licences, some are creative commons, some are MIT or BSD licenced.

Robin says…

Update:

The MPL made sense for Netscape in 1998 in view of their business outlook. It seems to work well for the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation. I’m not sure that it’s the right licensing scheme for Flock.

So we are taking things one step at a time when it comes to our source code licensing policies. We’ve already made a couple of big strategic decisions on the source code licensing front: (i) our code will be largely (maybe even entirely) open source, (ii) we’re putting it out to the world right now under the GPL, (iii) we’re asking contributors to assign copyrights to us. These steps mean that we are open source and provide us with the flexibility to evolve our source code licensing policies over time.

As I’ve indicated above, we are serious about working with the Mozilla community. As we work with folks at the Mozilla Foundation/Corporation and identify areas where it makes sense for our code to go back upstream, then we will relicense those pieces of code under the triple license.

Says Bart
Update:

Robin posts about how to build flock.

is this microphone on?