The Factory currently offers the following services:

Development tools

• Version control system (SVN)

For the implementation of the Version control system service, Subversion has been adopted as the back-end platform.
The java API SVNKit has been chosen to manage the repositories created with the Factory. SVNKit implements all Subversion features and provides APIs to work with Subversion working copies, access and manipulate Subversion repositories.
SVNKit provides the individual functionality to create a local repository, that is detailed in the next section.
However, because a repository has to be exploited by any external Subversion clients (Tortoise or a plugin of eclipse for examples) and all subversion requests (commit, checkout,) have to be treated to be integrated in the Factory, a java implementation of a server ssh have been implemented in the Factory using the apache API sshd and connected to subversion invoking the lightweight subversion server svnserve. With it, all repositories created in the Factory are accessible by the ssh protocol (urls begin with svn+ssh).

• Issue tracker (Mantis)

For the implementation of the Issue tracker service, the web-based bugtracking system MANTISBT has been adopted as the back-end platform. The basic functionality of MANTISBT is exposed through a SOAP interface (project named mantis-connect). The main functionalities of this service comprise the creation, modification and deletion of issues.

• Workflow (Bonita)
• Distributed version control system (GIT)

Information sharing tools

• Forum (Mermig)

The Forum Service supports the discussion among projects' members on specific topics. The users participate in forum discussions in order to exchange different opinions. As shown above, the main functionalities of this service comprise the creation of discussion topics (forums), the posting of messages, the replying to messages, the management of the content and the closing of the forums.

• Document Management (Mermig)
• Calendar (Mermig)

For the implementation of the Calendar service, the MERMIG Advance Collaboration and Communication platform (www.mermig.com), developed by European Dynamics, has been adopted as the back-end platform.
The Calendar service aims at providing the functionality to the users to plan and manage an agenda of events. The service allows the users to keep record of all their scheduled meetings and other events within their group/project.

• Mailing list manager (Mailman)

The Mailing list (based in Mailman tool), allow manage electronic mail lists. The allowed operations are creating a Mail List, showing all the existing Mail lists and all the messages inside a Mail List and adding users to a Mailman List.

• Chat (ChatOS)

The ChatOS service is implemented based on a Jabber server, called OpenFire, but can be used with other Jabber server or with gtalk. For details about the OpenFire, please, refer to the relevant documentation available through the website http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/index.jsp.

• VoIP and video conference (based on Asterisk)

The VoIP audio/video calls service aims at providing the functionality to the members of a project to plan and manage an agenda of audio/video conference calls. The service allows the users to keep record (by viewing, creating, deleting, etc) of all their scheduled conferences. Furthermore, the VoIP audio/video calls service inter-operates with other Factory service (Calendar service), in order to support the implementation of the necessary business processes.
The implementation of the VoIP service is based on the Asterisk-Java library which allows to integrate Asterisk with Java code.

• Skills management

The idea of this tool is to collect information about the skills of the users of the collaborative environment in order to improve their collaboration and to allow the search for community members according to their skills.

Related documents

The factory is a work in progress. Until proper packaging has been performed, each components have to be manually installed, with their own installation procedure.