Pandora Live / Pandora Network


KodeIn said:
As Vertice said, it's not facebook (or any similar things), it's more like some kind of automatic statuses.

And if it was possible, having a central chat system for pandora games

It's presence, notification and a useful central component to hang other services off of.
other services include things like match making / online play, leaderboards etc.

it's plumbing that allows us to build a more connected and cohesive community.

Its already moving that way with the AppStore as a distribution mechanism, which I hope
will be able to allow ratings and comments (ala android market)

As for the name, it was brought up in the appstore naming thread , but i think Agora is a fantastic name.
It was the name of the market / meeting place in ancient greece. similar to the Forum in roman times.
 
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Vertice said:
As for the name, it was brought up in the appstore naming thread , but i think Agora is a fantastic name.
It was the name of the market / meeting place in ancient greece. similar to the Forum in roman times.

If the "appstore" and TINX (or more accurately what we are talking about right now) are interweaved, yes Agora would be the perfect name.
A place to share and exchange softwares and discussions.
 
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OK this isn't the naming discussion thread. but nobody knows what Agora refers to unless googling for the term. It does neither relate to software nor to the Pandora. OK, so it's greek. Big whoop, wanna fight about it?
 
kuru said:
OK this isn't the naming discussion thread. but nobody knows what Agora refers to unless googling for the term. It does neither relate to software nor to the Pandora. OK, so it's greek. Big whoop, wanna fight about it?
Hmmm, I knew the term since I learned greek history at school...
Moreover, you never heard of agoraphobia?
 
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kuru said:
OK this isn't the naming discussion thread. but nobody knows what Agora refers to unless googling for the term. It does neither relate to software nor to the Pandora. OK, so it's greek. Big whoop, wanna fight about it?

Yeah, putemup, putemup.

mostly i just hate the name TINXL. recursive acronyms were tedious 20 years ago already =)
 
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i put TINXL on hold in late 2008, waiting until the pandora arrived to code it... i kinda expected to have finishedstarted it by now!

If anyone is interested in joining forces to start work, grab me in the IRC channel (#openpandora on freenode)
 
I cant actually find much of a design document as such for the app store.

All i know it's a completely bespoke development. I'm just going to give a bit of a lower level overview of how I would put the whole system together if I were starting from scratch, using tools I already know and am comfortable with. This is not meant to offend any work already done on the store or suggest it should be replaced, it's just informative. A lot of these components have analogs already.

Package distribution
for background, I am a Drupal core developer (drupal.org) , and the company i work for (development seed) has actually been writing some package distribution tools for drupal recently.
We call them 'feature servers'. This is developed as a 'feature' itself, so you can easily add it to an existing Drupal site, but very often you just want this functionality on it's own.

So for instance our public code website is a feature server and hosts the feature server itself - http://code.developmentseed.org/singular/dashboard
and other packages too - http://code.developmentseed.org/featureserver/dashboard

The following is a public feature server - http://community.featureservers.org/

or one of the basic private feature servers - http://features.pingv.com/

You can also take a look at the (admittedly drupal centric) video showing how to use it - http://vimeo.com/5314580

Now the 'magic' part of the feature server isn't just the allowing you to upload releases and tag them and so forth, it's that it also generates RSS feeds of all the packages and releases.
These are currently in drupal.org's xml format, but this was a rather simple addon to the fserver project and can be modified to do anything.

So for each project you have a separate feed of updates, and the .pnd file would have a link to this feed, and notify you of new releases when you run it.

We also have backend code and integration which physically builds packages from our code repositories and publishes them online (like git hook scripts etc.)

Because of the feeds, it is possible to build a different application to manage store downloads if need be.

It's also pretty simple to 'accoutrify' the projects with things like reviews , and do tagging for them so you can sort them. A very simple fixed width theme
that is conditionally switched when using the app store application on the pandora would provide a clean and easy to develop user interface.

At some point we could integrate Ubercart (www.ubercart.org) , and give provisional download access to packages only to people who have paid..

The next part is more interesting and technical however ...

central login
We would need to install an identity store somewhere, that various things can connect to. So I would probably install LDAP, and on the drupal site , i would add the following : http://drupal.org/project/ldap_integration and http://drupal.org/project/ldap_provisioning

This would mean that creating an account on the website, creates the account on LDAP , and vice versa. During initialization of the pandora, or when using the web store
from the pandora for the first time, we would step the user through creating an account (which is optional of course). If they have an account we seed the details into the
backend jabber client that manages updates.

We're actually rather lucky in that we have a fairly flat organizational model. I've seen some crazy stuff needing to integrate jabber with large complex organizations.

xmpp - server
We would install an XMPP server, probably something like ejabberd, to use the data store of accounts we created on the web site. So your website login is your jabber login etc.

ejabberd is also interesting in that it seems to support some XEPs which allow for server side scripting, so you could potentially write some rather interesting interactions.


xmpp - client
There would be a small daemon on the pandora itself, using very little memory and only making a connection to the jabber server when it needs to, that would simply be
accessed through the library level only. IE: in the game or emulator you would have an api call that would say "current status". At first we might just use a text string,
but we can extend it further as the tinxl spec specifies.

We can then further decide whether we want to build our own roster management utility, but the included client (pidgin) will also work with the account details, so you already
have full chat and friend management, with the ability to share status with them.

The real benefits in this will only come as the user facing component integrating into the small backend jabber client becomes more evolved. We'd be doing things that don't
really have place in pidgin, but pidgin would obviously still be usable for chat.
 
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