[Wikireader] openZIM Developers Meeting 2010 in Strasbourg

Tue Oct 19 12:24:34 EDT 2010

Dear all,

last weekend the openZIM team held its Developers Meeting for 2010. We 
planned to have two Developers Meeting per year, one in spring, one in 
fall. But as there were too many events in and around spring and all of 
us are volunteers we decided to better spend this weekend with our 
families. So this was our first and only Developers Meeting in 2010.

Participants:
* Emmanuel Engelhard (Kiwix maintainer and organizer of this meeting)
* Tommi Mäkitalo (openZIM main developer)
* Christian Pühringer (WikiOnBoard maintainer)
* Ralf Schmitt (developer of Pediapress)
* Manuel Schneider

== Collections Extension for MediaWiki / Pediapress ==
Ralf from Pediapress visited us on Saturday to discuss with us the 
integration of the ZIM format into their Collections extension which is 
used on Wikimedia wikis to create books (printed on demand or exported 
as PDF or ODF). This idea was born on the Wikimedia Conference in April 
2010 when we had a Wikipedia Offline meeting.

Tommi and Ralf exchanged thoughts about the implementation, Tommi made 
some changes to the zimwriter to make it more modular while Ralf wrote a 
Python wrapper for zimlib. In a test program Ralf was able to create his 
first ZIM file using Python and the new modularized zimwriter.

While Pediapress is in touch with the Wikimedia Foundation in order to 
make a project with them for the integration of ZIM into their software 
Ralf agreed to at least finish the test program in Python which can be 
downloaded here:
http://github.com/schmir/pyzim

We hope that WMF and Pediapress come to an agreement so the actual 
integration can happen soon.

== Documentation of the ZIM File Format ==
As we made a lot of changes last year on the ZIM file format the 
documentation was partly outdated and partly not detailed enough. We 
spent roughly one day to improve the documentation, its size has doubled 
during this weekend.

A few parts of the format, notably the URL scheme and encoding, native 
category handling, per-article meta data and the HTML layout was not 
properly specified, so we spend some time to discuss the details and fix 
these issues. They need to be implemented now, maybe the last major 
changes to the ZIM format, but these changes don't break compatibility 
as they were already prepared in the past.

Another addition to the format - a new idea, but also 
backward-compatible - was the checksum. Newer ZIM files can now be 
checked by the new zimlib if they are corrupted. This was a request from 
users in Peru which have a hard time to download ZIM files and as they 
often have to resume transfers the files are likely to get corrupted. As 
they still work in most parts but cause errors in specific situations 
only it was hard to tell what the problem was.

http://openzim.org/ZIM_File_Format

== Reader Applications ==
News on specific readers, this is not a list of all available reader 
applications.

=== Windows / Linux ===
Kiwix is already wellknown and works perfectly on both GNU/Linux and 
Windows. It is a GUI application - a browser - to view ZIM files and 
also features a webserver to view ZIM in a network using a standard browser.

Emmanuel's roadmap is to create big ZIM files in the next months 
including all images for the selected articles. The next WP 1.0 release 
will be produced soon, the selection process is almost done. He bought a 
new server to do that, partly sponsored by Wikimedia Italia. The biggest 
effort is to create and optimize all the thumbnails of the images, so he 
is now trying to get a server at the datacenter of the Wikimedia 
Foundation where he can read the image files directly from the repositories.

http://www.kiwix.org/index.php/Main_Page

=== Symbian / Android ===
This year Christian published WikiOnBoard, a Symbian application to view 
ZIM files. It works very well on recent Nokia phones. On Sunday 
Christian presented us WikiOnBoard on Android - after he was able to get 
Qt installed on Android WikiOnBoard can be compiled on Android without 
any porting.

The plan is to implement a touch screen GUI to WikiOnBoard, so it can be 
used on never Nokia phones and on Android devices. The current version 
of WikiOnBoard only works with a keyboard which becomes less and less 
common. Once this is done WikiOnBoard will be published in the Nokia Ovi 
Store and Android market.

Christian asked for sponsorship for a new touch screen phone (about 150 
EUR plus the help to get it via Germany as it is not available yet in 
many other countries). As the openZIM budget offers enough room for this 
it only depends on the team to approve this sponsorship.

http://wiki.github.com/cip/WikiOnBoard/

== MediaWiki API interface for zimwriter ==
Emmanuel and Tommi want to write a proof-of-concept of a zimwriter 
interface which uses the MediaWiki API directly to get all articles out 
of a wiki.

== ZIM File Library ==
We want to start working on our ZIM File library to make it easier for 
users to fine ZIM files.

This involves finding mirror sites and writing a download page which 
reads ZIM meta data, shows a searchable list of files and redirects 
downloads to the mirror servers.

== Events in 2011 ==
=== Developers Meeting ===
August 2nd / 3rd

We decided to have the next and only openZIM meeting in 2011 during the 
Hacking Days which are prior Wikimania 2011 in Haifa, Israel.

Asuming that we will be able to get the same sponsorship as this year we 
agreed that in this case will reimburse travel costs for this meeting in 
Israel.

Registration to Wikimania will start in January, Manuel will send a 
notification to the openZIM mailing list. Everyone interested is urged 
to register and pay as soon as possible, as there will be a decent early 
bird discount and accommodation is part of the registration. Then 
everyone should book a flight. The receipts and invoices for 
registration and the flights will then go to Manuel who will take care 
of the reimbursement.

=== LinuxTag ===
May 11th - 14th

As always LinuxTag will take place in Berlin and we will be part of it. 
We plan to have one or two talks about openZIM, Tommi will do again a 
live-coding session to show how to use zimlib while Emmanuel offered a 
talk about the steps of how to create an offline version of Wikipedia, 
explaining selection, code cleanups, link rewriting etc.

== End ==
Ok, that's it. Quite a long report, but we actually did a lot of work 
during these two days. Additionally it is always very valuable to speak 
face-to-face and get to know new team members.

This last year was not as active concerning features and development as 
last year, but I consider it being a great progress nevertheless - this 
year we were able to stabilize the format, get the implementation and 
documentation right and reach out for new users such as Pediapress or 
WikiOnBoard.

The next year we will have to
* finish the last open items concerning implementation
* get the mobile readers released to the official markets / app stores
* get the toolchains between MediaWiki and ZIM running, such as 
Collections extension and the MW API interface

Pictures: See here http://openzim.org/Developer_Meetings/2010-2

Thanks for the participants to be there and help getting the work done 
and to Wikimedia CH as our generous sponsor to make this possible.

Thank you for your attention,

Manuel Schneider

-- 
Regards
Manuel Schneider

Wikimedia CH - Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens
Wikimedia CH - Association for the advancement of free knowledge
www.wikimedia.ch