What's that ?

The various weekly updates the Mozilla projects are a good way to follow, from a ten thousands foot point of view, what's going on

I'd like to do my own contribution and launch my own weekly update, about the work we are doing in my team (Mozilla Services) and in particular everything related to Python. I'll try to keep it biased and say good things about Python and bad things about PHP and Perl ;).

More seriously, I think that's a good way to sync with the community for the ones who cares about Python and Mozilla, and get some feedback. Especially since the services we build are not direct end-user products for people out there. Although, they play an important role in the background. For instance, to store and retrieve your encrypted bookmarks via the Firefox Sync add-on, you are calling our Services.

I'll keep those reports short and synthetic and I'll leave it up to the readers to ask for more details on specific points. I will try not to use internal technical jargon.

Week 47

Easy Setup on new devices :
- The server-side, using memcached & Python is ready. It's now deployed on stage using Nginx and Gunicorn, and the security team is now reviewing it. - I worked with Richard to deploy it through rpms. The pypi2rpm script I wrote now works well and creates a RPM out of any project released at PyPI, with the right options for CentOS.

Firefox Sync in Python:
- Rysiek (from Poland) now successfully use the server with his LDAP and Postgres setup, after we worked on adding options for him. - Ian reviewed the code of server-core and I followed up with a few fixes. - Toby is now using it as well in the new project he works on, and gave me some feedback on the provided APIs. We fixed a few things to make his life easier

OpenID :

I have started a prototype of an OpenID server for Services. It works now with all websites I know of, that consume Openid. It uses Redis to store the association handles and the sites tokens. For the protocol implementation, I've first used python-openid but I ended up doing custom code. python-openid is great but a bit over-engineered for what I need to do on server-side. Although, one really useful feature in this project is in its examples/ folder: a client application you can use to test your server, and vice-versa.

The client part in Firefox is acustom weave-identity add-on that automatically performs the authentication on the openid server, and removes all manual steps you need to authorize a site. It replaces the input text where you usually type your open id identity, with a "sign in" button.

Next Week Plans

Well, this week as of yesterday :)
- Easy Setup: Will follow Richard and Michael work on deployment and reviews and help them in case there's an issue - Sync: more reviews planned, need to write doc for sync-core - OpenId: need to write the script for benchmarking the server using Funkload. - more things !