Coherence/KDE sprint Day 1

Big splash for yesterday evening: “Breakthrough in the hotel!”

Barcelona, wonderful city. Crowded with a lot of people, enjoying the life style and atmosphere. This weekend there are six people more, but here for hard work, to do some collaboration on UPnP support in FLOSS software. So is there a better place to stay at then the Collabora Multimedia office here in Barcelona?

Together with Bart Cerneels, from the Amarok crowd and to most of us known as the great organizer of Akademy 2008, I am here to write code to connect to the UPnP world, by using Coherence. If you haven’t already heard of Coherence before, it is an well developed UPnP-enabling framework, written in Python and accessible via D-Bus by any other program, hiding the UPnP complexity both to the providers and the consumers of UPnP services.
So e.g. Amarok could easily offer access to its own media collections for any UPnP capable client on the network as well as access those of others, at the same time control any other player in the network (MediaRenderer in UPnP terms).
And it is also a comfortable way to add a UPnP backend to the network:/ kioslave, so the UPnP-only devices and their services are also listed there. I was hoping someone else was going to do this, but, well, scratch your itch…

Still it feels like boring work to do compared to what some others sitting at the table with us are doing: There is Philippe Normand who is working on tubing UPnP over the intertubes with the Mirabeau plugin to Coherence. And there is Zaheer Abbas Merali, who is wrapping standard UPnP services around little next-generation-mars^W indoor robots, so you can access the robot with any standard UPnP client (like the PS3, PSP or XBox). Then there is Sebastian Pölsterl who works to build a UPnP supporting personal video recorder (PVR) based on his DVB-Daemon.
Last but not least with us are Frank Scholz, the founder and main developer of Coherence, and Benjamin Kampmann, official vice-president of marketing for Coherence.

I had a quick start with the code Adriaan de Groot had written at the first Coherence/KDE sprint in Paris this spring. Still I had nothing to show when we left the office in the evening. But when most of us went to spend much money to watch 22 men catch a single ball, just to kick it away again, Bart and I waited for them in the hotel, typing even more code and then, the breakthrough, at least for me:

And it comes with congrats to Ahmed Moustaf! His computer was the first to appear in the network:/ kioslave by being feeded from the Coherence-driven UPnP backend. Sitting in the hotel room I had no longer all the devices available like we have with us in the Collabora office, but another friendly, although unknown person had his computer broadcasting his UPnP services, so there was content. You won’t see from the documenting screenshot it is from the UPnP, as that is one of the targets of the network:/ kioslave, hiding all the unneeded technical details from the user. And his computer disappeared soon after when I wanted to screenshot some UPnP only listing, was it because we started to browse his media collection and he found out?* 😉 So just believe it 🙂

*Because if there is one thing which seems to suck with UPnP it is the lack of any access control built into the system. Everybody can access everything. Well, hopefully soon KDE programs can, too 🙂