Walking the walk : Standards support in fixx
by Sarat Pediredla Under General, NewsAs strong supporters of open standards and grass-roots community efforts on the web, we at hedgehog lab have always taken pride in helping further the adoption of both.
However, there has always been a feeling lurking at the back of our minds that a lot of this felt like lip-service and that we could do more to lead by example.
Therefore, I am pleased to announce that after a month of development, fixx supports a key set of open standards. This was a tough decision on our end, as it meant that we had to delay the launch of fixx by more time than we intended to.
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Open ID
In our experience, Open ID uptake in the enterprise has been slow. The primary reason for this is potentially that many internal users are locked into either a Single Sign-on (SSO) or LDAP solution, as enterprise administrators generally tend to distrust authentication schemes that they have no control over. This is OK if your issue tracker is a closed, private system.
However, when your issue tracker is open to your customers (which it should), or you are an open source project that would like to encourage people to contribute, supporting Open ID ensures that they can authenticate painlessly without having to remember another set of authentication details.
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Microformats
fixx currently supports hCard to represent user and profile information. fixx also supports various elemental microformats for content.
We still have a long way in making fixx completely microformats-enabled as we look at incorporating XFN, hCalendar, and xFolk in the future and looking at how we could use some of the more obscure microformats in a web application scenario.
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Data Portability
Data-centric (views that return system data) in fixx support retrieving the view in either XHTML, JSON, or XML format, enabling you to write your own widgets and front-end to retrieving data in fixx.
There is also the ability to export your issues into CSV, Excel or PDF formats to do what you want with it.
In spite of all the standards support for fixx, there are still places where it can do with improvements (and we are working on this in future releases).
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REST API
Although fixx currently has a REST interface to add, manage and view your data (in JSON, XML, XHTML), the implementation is incomplete and undocumented. We hope to have a finished implementation and complete documentation for the second release of fixx.
Note to hackers: There is still a lot of REST functionality for you to tinker around with (we know you want to!)
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RSS
RSS feeds for key views are planned for the next version of fixx. Given that fixx supports notifications through e-mail and Twitter at this moment, RSS is a lower priority in our feature list.
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XMPP
Continuing with the theme of notifications, fixx will support XMPP and various other messaging protocols for notifications sent directly to the desktop.
Finally, apologies for the delay in release to everyone who has signed up to be notified, but we are confident that the work we are putting in will be worth the delay.
