1st SMW webinar for developers

1st SMW webinar for developers
The webinar in which experienced developers teach how to SMW works and how it's possible to extend it.
Conference details
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Local Chair:
Program Chair:
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Table of Contents
Contents 1 Problem 2 Goals of the webinar 2.1 Planned results 3 Topics to be discussed 3.1 The architecture 3.2 Applied topics 4 Prerequisites and preparation for the learners 5 Participants

This page describes the content of the first SMW webinar for amateur developers.

Problem[edit]

In short:

Nobody understand how SMW works and how to improve it. The documentation of the code is not sufficient for a new developer to quickly start participating in writing SMW code.

In details:

SMW is now being developed by 3-4 people:

There are many other developers in SMW community that could have joined to the development process, but now the effort required to figure out what's happening inside SMW is too big. The previous experience have shown that good developer documentation can increase the number of participants. For instance we have a short tutorial on writing result formats and many new result formats have been developed.

Goals of the webinar[edit]

Eliminate the barriers that hinder new developers from participation.
Create the documentation for the programmers but waste minimum of core developers' time.

Planned results[edit]

The tangible results of the webinar will be the following:

Video recording of the webinar
Architecture guide improved by webinar participants
Some howtos on how to solve real problems in SMW:

Topics to be discussed[edit]

The architecture[edit]

How SMW is organized inside? What parts of Architecture guide are outdated and don't reflect the current state of the code?
What's happening when I add the property to my page?
What's happening when I query something?

Applied topics[edit]

In which ways can SMW be extended? What abstract classes, hooks and interfaces do we have?
How to do the following things:
- How to add new reasoning capability? For example support the inverse properties?
- How to extend the query language?
- How to add new types of properties and extend the old ones?
- How to search the bottlenecks in the performance?
- How to read SMW data from PHP code?
- How to write SMW data from PHP code?

Prerequisites and preparation for the learners[edit]

Before going to webinar you'd better be prepared! Read the following docs:

Tag extensions and other pages on how to develop MediaWiki extensions
Architecture guide
Writing result printers and try to implement one simple result format
Programmer's guide to SMW
Constructing queries in PHP (something maybe outdated)
Ask API - HTTP API of SMW

The webinar is a practical event. We will look at the code and maybe will write some code, so:

Install the 1.20 version of MediaWiki and the master version of Semantic MediaWiki (from git) on your local machine
Install the IDE for PHP programming. PhpStorm is recommended, Eclipse is also possible. Investigate ActiveState Komodo too.
Open the SMW code in your IDE
Try to configure the debugging in your IDE

Participants[edit]

Teachers:

Jeroen De Dauw

Learners:

Add yourself here