Nabble is now open-source

[Raven<Nabble>]

Nabble is now open-source.

Here is the public repository.
https://bitbucket.org/frschmidt/nabble

[Gary Lewis]

Cool!  But will we have to keep watching there to see what's shared, or should people post here when they do?

[Raven<Nabble>]

People can post here if they want. Or we might announce it, I guess we will figure out how to deal with it once someone submits something.

[GregChapman]

The trouble, at the moment, is that you have to be all of these:

• familiar with and committed to Nabble
• a coder
• familiar with Bitbucket

When the Nabble page at Bitbucket announces:

THERE ISN'T A README YET
A README file tells people where to start and how to contribute.

it shouts at me that there is no commitment from the existing team to develop Nabble, and it's more that the team has decided to put the project into a medically induced coma, under the care of Bitbucket nurses, and are waiting for others to develop a cure.

I fear that unless the current Nabble team actively promote Nabble's new status, no one with the necessary skills will ever encounter Nabble or feel encouraged to join the development team.

For my part, apart from Nabble, all the other features that I add to my sites are delivered through Softaculous. That service, which is integrated with my hosting account, already provides a dozen different forums, and scores of others application types which I can install and customise. Most of these are well documented and have an enthusiastic and active development team. Skilled coders are far more likely to join one of those than attempt to rescue Nabble.

My skills are limited to HTML and CSS which are peripheral to Nabble's development. I'll continue to provide what Nabble documentation I can through my GregHelp forum, but would not know how to start with platforms like Sourceforge, Github or Bitbucket. I need to be encouraged and welcomed in by a team who understand such things and can help a novice.

[si]

seems Debian is doing all it can to destroy the debian distro.

they heavily rely on Nabble, which clearly is one of the worst options available.

Seems Debian always goes for the worst options as a matter of policy.

GregChapman wrote

The trouble, at the moment, is that you have to be all of these:

• familiar with and committed to Nabble
• a coder
• familiar with Bitbucket

When the Nabble page at Bitbucket announces:

THERE ISN'T A README YET
A README file tells people where to start and how to contribute.

it shouts at me that there is no commitment from the existing team to develop Nabble, and it's more that the team has decided to put the project into a medically induced coma, under the care of Bitbucket nurses, and are waiting for others to develop a cure.

[OS-Jason]

So, I guess this means that the new forum software in devopment, is no longer in devolpment?

[nnako]

Hi Nabble devs,
  hello Franklin,
    hello Raven,

open sourcing Nabble is good news! I have great respect for what you did so far and what Nabble is right now.

I had a look at the bitbucket location and must say, though, that in order to attract people for working on Nabble's source, you should at least provide some basics:

information about system and environmental requirements
It is not necessary to provide every detail about the target server system Nabble must be based on, in order to provide its services to the outside world. But the key hardware and software requirements and restrictions would help a big deal in building a working system at first try.

documentation of a successful installation process
Unless you provide an installation process description, people will loose their time trying to get things running on different systems. In order to avoid this, you should at least provide an installation description which explains how to build up your current configuration. Further systems may follow afterwards.

structural documentation about Nabble's internal concepts
When everything is set up properly, most interested developers would like to have a quick overview about the structure and interconnections within the Nabble source code. I've seen, there are currently 934 source files within the repository. You can not expect highly experienced developers to start probing into the files in order to extract structural information. Rather you as Nabble developers should gather your knowledge and at least try to sketch some basic structural information which make understanding different parts of the internals of Nabble possible. From here, issues can easily be addressed and solved in view of the whole system.

If you leave the project like it is now, the source will probably not be touched at all. At least not by experienced programmers who value their time and can't afford wasting it probing around. That's for sure. Maybe you would get some novice pull requests which have to be discarded anyway, as they are not in line with the overall concepts. And I hope this is not your intention, but to really work on the code base and make it greater.

As GregChapman mentioned, if you want Nabble to become outstanding (invest into its current state), you must win experienced developers who are willing to invest their precious time into this project. And for "winning" those developers, you should start with basic structural information about Nabble. This information should cover questions like:

- how do the different parts like NAML, luan, core, UI, ... work together on a technical level?
- what are the key issues that makes the usage / configuration / development of Nabble difficult
- ...

What do you think?

Regards, and thanks again.
Nnako

GregChapman wrote

THERE ISN'T A README YET
A README file tells people where to start and how to contribute.
...
I fear that unless the current Nabble team actively promote Nabble's new status, no one with the necessary skills will ever encounter Nabble or feel encouraged to join the development team.
...

[vialav]

Hi Nabble devs,

I'm one of those 'novices' probbing around :-). First, thanks for making Nabble open source! I came here in my futile search of a standalone client for Nabble.

I was actually able to "build" the "missing" (?, am I mistaken?) jars:
- cachingfilter.jar
- global.jar
- jdbcpgbackup.jar
- nabble.jar
meticulously following the luan.jar procedure (which I succeeded to run on my machine).

[Hey guys! I've even made the libluan-java_0.24_all.deb package for this, which works unimpeccable!]

However, I'm not able to run Nabble at all with Luan :-( - it throws errors at me.

Some guidance from dev maitres/Meister would be certanly helpful to see if could make Nabble run on my system

[nnako]

Hi vialav,

I am a "novice" myself, at least in many fields, trying to save some valuable time by not having to probe around and thriving for gaining more and more experience ;-)

Didn't mean it in a disrespectful way, my friend. Just trying to hold up the bar.

Would you mind trying to share your experience concerning the "system environment" and "installation process"? For others to get a quicker startup?

vialav wrote

I'm one of those 'novices' probbing around :-). First, thanks for making Nabble open source! I came here in my futile search of a standalone client for Nabble.

[vialav]

Hi, nnako,

I was actually very happy that you've joined the chorus, not in any way perceived being "tagged" 'a novice'.

Surely, the procedure is relatively easy (for building jars):

Follow the logic of https://bitbucket.org/frschmidt/luan/src/default/scripts/build-luan.sh

Of course, I assume javac is installed in your path. I'm using 'classic' Oracle JDK 8 from a PPA under Ubuntu.

So, cd in the repo directory first, and then, for **{cachingfilter,global,jdbcpgbackup,nabble}**:

rm -rf build # even if it doesn't exist
mkdir -p build/{cachingfilter,global,jdbcpgbackup,nabble}/jars

find . -name *.class -delete # you need it *only once* for speed

. classpath.sh # you need it *only once* for speed
javac -classpath $CLASSPATH `find src -name *.java`

find . -name *.java -delete # you need it *only once* for speed

# repeat the following for {cachingfilter,global,jdbcpgbackup,nabble}:

# for example, using 'nabble':
cd src; jar cvf ../build/nabble/jars/nabble.jar `find nabble -type f`; cd ..
cp lib/* build/nabble/jars

# That's It!

[vialav]

Hey, guys,

Please, share here any progress so far. Has anybody succeeded in tracing the cause of errors in running the open-source Nabble?

It has been now two months since the original announcement, what is the status of the project?

Best regards,
vialav

[vialav]

Seriously, **five** months with no single reply?

[mark]

I'm not sure wherein Debian uses Nabble (their main forum doesn't seem to be a Nabble forum), but I'm pretty impressed with Nabble, personally. Are you talking about a mailing list archive? If Debian actually is using Nabble somewhere, they could do a lot worse, IMO. Debian is a cool Linux distribution (I used to use it), but I use Xubuntu, these days.

What exactly don't you like about it? What exactly do you like about the competition?

Nabble has some of the fastest (if not the fastest) forum software out there, by all appearances. This makes it take a whole lot less time to use. Very clean. The forums can be made quite easy to navigate/view/read in a useful fashion, especially with the Topics View being available. Posting is very quick. Reading is quick. Themes are nice. You can use it as an emailing list (I don't know anyone else who offers that). When you post, you can include others via email (I don't know anyone else who offers that, either). They allow native image and attachment uploads. They don't truncate URLs. They don't redirect to your URLs from some strange URL. It's free. Users can lock their own threads (if you let them); this is a pretty rare feature, but one I definitely enjoy. Polls.

There are a few things I would suggest to make it better (if they wouldn't slow Nabble down notably or anything):
* Make adding mini-profile fields easier.
* Make it so you can upload multiple images at once.
* Make it so you so there's an option to fit images to the width of the screen (keeping them proportionate).
* Make it so the Last Post column tells the subject and sub-forum, and shows the poster's avatar.
* Make it so you can can totally customize your profile page (just make it like a regular post instead of having fields, maybe).
* Make it so you can embed videos from more sites (such as Amazon, for those who take videos on a Kindle Fire and upload them to Amazon).
* The ability to like posts.
* Custom ranks for users that change based on their post-counts. Badges that they earn by doing certain things could be cool, too (kind of like StackExchange does).
* Make it so the threaded view can be made the default for everyone on a forum. That would make the threaded view a lot more useful for those who use it.
* Make a progress indicator for attachment uploads (so you know how much longer it'll take).

EDIT: Other than maybe the last item, you could probably do all that with NAML, I've realized.

Other than that, Nabble seems pretty much perfect to me, and I can live without those other features if I have to. I definitely prefer Nabble to other sites that host free forums. I haven't tried using Nabble software on my own server.

[vialav]

Then how does ONE build Nabble from its advertised open source?

[GregChapman]

Hi Vialav,

Your question is valid.

Nabble really do need to provide some rudimentary documentation to be able to declare that Nabble is now open source.

[freedom]

Great job!

[April]

hi,
I am interested in nabble but can't run a "Nabble website" on my server,would  you give some help,or,where can i find a "install instruction" for nabble.

My env: unbuntu,java8, when i run server.sh,error occures:

cache cleared
module 'java:nabble.utils.Log4j' not found
        file:conf/serve_nabble.luan line 8
        classpath:luan/cmd_line.luan line 26
        classpath:luan/cmd_line.luan line 23

[April]

hi,
I am interested in nabble but can't run a "Nabble website" on my server,would  you give some help,or,where can i find a "install instruction" for nabble.

My env: unbuntu,java8, when i run server.sh,error occures:

cache cleared
module 'java:nabble.utils.Log4j' not found
        file:conf/serve_nabble.luan line 8
        classpath:luan/cmd_line.luan line 26
        classpath:luan/cmd_line.luan line 23

[Israel <Nabble>]

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[April]

thank u so much for your help！