FOSSASIA

FOSSASIA Summit 2021 with the topics Robotics, Open Hardware, Pocket Science Lab, Python and Web development, Digital Sovereignty on Day 1

The FOSSASIA Virtual Summit 2021 starts on Saturday 13th March at 2:00PM (SGT) with an opening keynote by Hong Phuc Dang and Mario Behling.

We are very happy you are joining the event! Each day has a different focus. The main topics of the first day are robotics, open hardware, Pocket Science Lab, Python, web development, and digital sovereignty.

How can you access the video rooms? Please login to the eventyay summit page and click on the right-side “Join Live Event” button. On the left a side-panel opens. You will see the different video channels of the event listed here as well as the event chat room that is open for participants already.

  • We have a final list of 190 speakers and panelists from 42 countries and 6 continents confirmed.
  • You can now use lots of new interactive features on our open source event solution and integrations with Jitsi, BigBlueButton, and Rocket Chat.
  • 180+ sessions, talks, panels and workshops are taking place at the event.

Please also visit the virtual exhibition and the exhibitor’s video rooms. Here you can meet our sponsors including Microsoft, Oracle, MySQL, OpenTAP Keysight, Linux Professional Institute, Elasticsearch, OpnTec, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, FreeBSD Foundation, UI-licious, Lifelong Learning Institute Singapore, the UNESCO and many community projects, makerspaces, and university IT groups. We have prepared a video guide to get you started.

FOSSASIA Summit Sessions on Saturday, 13 March

Below are the sessions taking place on Saturday, 13th March all listed in Singapore timezone (SGT). You can access the online schedule of the day here.

14:00  Opening Keynote, Hong Phuc Dang, Mario Behling (Talk 25 min)

15:00  Software in the Public Interest: Building blocks of SecureDrop project, Kushal Das  (Talk 25 min)

15:30  Open Source at Open Robotics: ROS, Gazebo and more, Marco A. Gutierrez (Talk 25 min)

16:00  Next gen robotics simulation with Ignition Gazebo, Luca Della Vedova (Talk 25 min)

16:30  Low-cost autonomous mobile robot powered by ROS 2 and Navigation 2, Yadunund Vijay (Talk 25 min)

17:00  Free Fleet: An Open Source Robot Fleet Management System, Aaron Chong (Talk 25 min)

17:30  Robotic Platform for exploring and evaluating search and reinforcement learning algorithms, Kelvin Tan (Talk 15 min)

17:45  Introduction to Emulation Development, Sreeram Venkitesh (Talk 15 min)

18:00  Choosing the right programming language for GUI implementation for Linux Embedded, Fábio Sobral (Talk 25 min)

18:30  LikeToHear – Self-Adjustment of Open Source Mobile Hearing Aid Prototype, Peggy Sylopp (Talk 25 min)

19:00  Bringing Collabora Online to your web app, Michael Meeks (Talk 25 min)

19:30  An I2P-based, fully distributed Bank and Exchange, Konrad Baechler (Talk 25 min)

20:00  Simple DataViz with PSLab: Universal Pocket Knife Workshop, Daniel Wessolek, Sara Reichert (Workshop 3h)

21:00  Web Development with Python, Flask and Javascript: Getting started with Open Event (eventyay), Areeb Jamal (Workshop 2h)

Continue ReadingFOSSASIA Summit 2021 with the topics Robotics, Open Hardware, Pocket Science Lab, Python and Web development, Digital Sovereignty on Day 1
Read more about the article FOSSASIA Virtual Summit 2021 Schedule and Highlights

FOSSASIA Virtual Summit 2021 Schedule and Highlights

We are very happy to share with you the schedule of the FOSSASIA Virtual Summit 2021!

  • 190+ speakers from 42 countries and 6 continents are joining us.
  • We are covering a diverse range of topics at the event such as Quantum computing, machine learning, open robotics, CAD and hardware development, search, databases, Covid-19 and open health, Blockchain, digital privacy, microservices, cloud, Kubernetes, kernel development, licensing and many more.
  • More than 180 sessions, talks, panels and workshops are taking place online. 
  • Plus, trainers conduct 28 hours of hands-on onsite sessions at the Lifelong Learning Institute in Singapore.

Get your free ticket here!

The summit will spread out over the week of March 13-21 and will run on our open source virtual event platform eventyay.

In the virtual exhibition you can meet our sponsors and partners like Microsoft, Oracle, MySQL, OpenTAP Keysight, Linux Professional Institute, Elasticsearch, OpnTec, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, FreeBSD, UI-licious, Lifelong Learning Institute Singapore and the UNESCO.

And you can get together with developers and contributors from Free and Open Source projects, makerspaces, developer clubs and university IT groups. At summit hubs across Asia we are connecting to participants online and locally.

FOSSASIA Summit Highlights

  • 5 keynotes from Hong Phuc Dang (Founder, FOSSASIA) and Mario Behling (Co-Founder FOSSASIA, CEO OpnTec), Frank Karlitschek (CEO, Nextcloud), Greg Kroah-Hartman (Linux Kernel Maintainer), Brian Behlendorf (Executive Director, Hyperledger) and Bunnie Huang (CEO, Precursor)
  • 150+ sessions covering tech areas of Quantum computing, PyTorch, Scikit-learn, pocket science, open robotics, FreeCAD, hardware development, search, databases, Debian packaging, Covid-19, Hyperledger, Open Source event solutions, digital privacy, microservices, cloud, Kubernetes, and Linux Kernel development.
  • 30+ hands-on workshops focusing on getting started with Python, creating MySQL shell utilities and custom plugins, setting up PostgreSQL databases, creating test automation, machine learning, and science measurements.
  • Panel discussions about Open Source licensing vs. available source licenses, firmware development, digital sovereignty, Blockchain and diversity in tech.
  • Virtual exhibition with video rooms and exhibitor tours where participants can connect with companies and active tech communities from across Asia.

FOSSASIA Summit Exhibition and Hubs

Apart from company partners you can meet communities, students and developers from Asia and around the world in our virtual exhibition. Groups include OpenFIESTA Tsinghua University, Shenzhen DIY Community, Open Source Hong Kong, OpenStack Indonesia, Mozilla Philippines, Ubuntu Korea, FOSS Myanmar, KDE, BuildingBloCS Singapore, SUTD, Python Software Foundation, LibreOffice, KiwiTCMS, Nextcloud Sourcefabric, LambdaChip, and more.

Hubs bring attendees together locally or online. Participating hubs include the International Organisation of Software Developers, Open Source Club at Saintgits Engineering College Kerala, Biohacking Space Peshawar Pakistan, Society for Data Science at BIT Mesra India, Mar Athanasius College of Engineering India, Developer Student Community in BHILAI Institute of Technology Durg and Team Aveon Racing of BIT Mesra India.

FOSSASIA Summit Daily Focus Topics

Each day has different focus topics and tracks.

Sat, 13 Mar: Robotics, Open Hardware, Pocket Science Lab, Python/Web development, Digital Sovereignty

Sun, 14 Mar: Open Hardware, open science, lightning talks, Python/Web development

Mon, 15 Mar: Blockchain, hardware, design, learn how to solder

Tue, 16 Mar: DevOps, cloud, containers, Kernel & Platform, Quantum computers, Kubernetes

Wed, 17 Mar: Databases, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Monitoring

Thu, 18 Mar: Security, Privacy,  Digital Sovereignty, IoT, cloud, Blockchain, Open Source voice assistants

Fri, 19 Mar: Artificial Intelligence, PyTorch, Visdom, search, scikit, NLP

Sat, 20 Mar: DevOps, Python bot programming, Container Regisitries, OSS Licenses vs. available source, FOSS Community in Asia, OpenStreetMap, Python/Web development

Sun, 21 Mar: Lightning talks, Open Health, Covid-19 apps around the world, Fdroid, platform, smart devices

Continue ReadingFOSSASIA Virtual Summit 2021 Schedule and Highlights
Read more about the article FOSSASIA Summit 2021 Call for Speakers and Projects

FOSSASIA Summit 2021 Call for Speakers and Projects

The FOSSASIA Summit 2021 will take place ONLINE this year. The event will spread out over the week of March 13 – 21 and will run on our own open source virtual event platform ‘eventyay’. 

Speakers interested to submit a talk, panel or workshop please propose your session before 4th February (soft deadline). We want to learn from you how to solve the challenges of our time with Open Technologies! 

At the event we are connecting local hubs, makerspaces, clubs and university IT groups across Asia. Please fill in this form to become a community hub partner and get listed on the event site.

Topics

The current situation around the world shows us that open global collaboration is the way to solve our problems. Now we would like you to share your hands-on examples at the event of topics such as how to:

  • Take on the fight against COVID-19 with open health technologies
  • Solve everyday problems with AI
  • Tackle climate change with an open source approach
  • Create open hardware solutions for science and Biohacking
  • Run DevOps in a distributed team in home office
  • Implement continuous delivery and sovereign cloud stacks with diverse tools
  • Establish a friendly, welcoming and collaborative project culture
  • Ensure digital sovereignty and independent data governance
  • Get privacy and security right
  • Customize Linux for lightweight hardware and special use cases
  • And what are best practices for open access education

.. and many more topics about Databases, Web and Mobile Technologies, Robotics, Blockchain, Design and Compliance. Please find the complete list of tracks on the event site and submit your proposal.

Important Dates

  • CfS soft deadline: 4 February 2021 (submissions receive priority)
  • Late submission cut off date: 11 February 2021
  • Event dates: 13 – 21 March 2021
  • Notification of acceptance: On an ongoing basis

Sessions and Slots

Talks

Talk slots are 15 minutes, 25 minutes or 40 minutes long these include time for questions and answers. We recommend to reserve at least a third of the time for questions. Shorter sessions are preferred to avoid online fatigue of the audience.

Panels

Panels are sessions with at least two panelists who discuss a topic and provide insights. Available slots are 55 minutes.

Workshops

Workshop options are 90 minutes, 2 hours or 3 hours. We are looking for interactive workshops where participants can actively engage in.

Lightning talks

You have some interesting ideas but do not want to submit a full talk? We suggest you go for a lightning talk which is a 5 minutes slot to present your idea or project.

Virtual exhibition

We offer virtual exhibition rooms for companies, projects, online installations, team gatherings and other fun activities. We are curious to know what you would like to show. Please add details in the submission form.

To Know

  • This year summit will take place online.
  • Speakers will conduct their sessions live to provide an interactive environment
  • Speakers can deliver sessions in English or a language of their choice.
  • Q&As and interaction among participants are highly encouraged.
  • Submissions for hands-on workshops and panel discussions are preferable as they provide more interactive opportunities.

Publication

Audio and video recordings of the lectures will be published in various formats under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. This license allows commercial use by media institutions as part of their reporting. If you do not wish for material from your lecture to be published or streamed, please let us know in your submission.

Links

FOSSASIA Summit: summit.fossasia.org

FOSSASIA Videos: Youtube FOSSASIA

FOSSASIA on Twitter: twitter.com/fossasia

Continue ReadingFOSSASIA Summit 2021 Call for Speakers and Projects
Read more about the article Welcome the Visdom Project at FOSSASIA Now Fully Open Source

Welcome the Visdom Project at FOSSASIA Now Fully Open Source

We are proud to announce that FOSSASIA is welcoming the Visdom project. The project is being transitioned from Facebook AI Research to the FOSSASIA Organization. As part of this transition it has been relicensed to the Apache License 2.0 as fully Open Source.

Visdom is a flexible tool for creating, organizing, and sharing visualizations of live, rich data. It aims to facilitate visualization of (remote) data with an emphasis on supporting scientific experimentation. It supports PyTorch and Numpy. 

Visdom was created in 2017 by Allan Jabri and Laurens van der Maaten of Facebook AI Research, and further developed under the leadership of Jack Urbanek. To date, 90 developers from around the world have contributed to the project with over 3000 projects depending on Visdom. It is now available on the FOSSASIA GitHub.

“I’m excited to see how Visdom continues to grow as a FOSSASIA project, as the community will set a new vision for what we all want out of it. While I’ll no longer be leading the project, I will remain engaged to provide clear context for transitions, code reviews, and direct code contributions.”

Jack Urbanek, Facebook Research Engineer and Visdom project lead

“My goal continues to be building amazing communities around state of the art AI rooted in open source collaboration. Bringing the Visdom project to FOSSASIA is a great example of this and I am extremely pleased to see the project continue this path with FOSSASIA as the new host of Visdom.”

Joe Spisak, Product Manager for Facebook’s open-source AI platform and PyTorch

FOSSASIA has been developing Open Source software applications and Open Hardware together with a global community from its base in Asia since 2009. FOSSASIA’s goal is to provide access to open technologies, science applications and knowledge that improve people’s lives stating in its mission: “We want to enable people to adapt and change technology according to their own ideas and needs and validate science and knowledge through an Open Access approach.” 

This mission perfectly aligns with the goals of Visdom as an Open Source tool that aims to:

  • Facilitate visualization of data with an emphasis on supporting scientific experimentation and 
  • Organize a visualization space programmatically or through the UI to create dashboards for live data, inspect results of experiments, or debug experimental code.

Hong Phuc Dang, OSI vice president and FOSSASIA founder says:

“We will continue the development of Visdom in cooperation with the developer and user community. We already discussed lots of ideas to move forward on an exciting roadmap with the core team and adding it to FOSSASIA’s Pocket Science Lab applications. We are looking forward to the input and involvement of the community to bring the project to the next level.”

Mario Behling, co-founder of FOSSASIA and CEO of OpnTec adds:

“We are thrilled that the Visdom project becomes fully Open Source as part of the project transition. It is fantastic to see how Facebook supports open technologies and takes an active role to foster International cooperation and development in the FOSS ecosystem by making this transition. I would like to thank Jack Urbanek who worked so hard on the project for years as well as the project creators Allan Jabri and Laurens van der Maaten, Joe Spisak whose role was essential in making this transition happen and the entire Facebook AI team.”

What are the plans for Visdom at FOSSASIA?

The short term plans are to establish all project channels to enable the developer community to actively participate in the project. On the technical side of things we are in the process of making the continuous integration work on the new deployment and adding tests and update checks. Visdom is also joining the Codeheat Coding Contest as a participating project. The contest runs until 30th June 2021.

Where is the list of issues?

The issue tracker is available on the code repository here: https://github.com/fossasia/visdom/ 

How can developers and users communicate?

Apart from adding issues in the issue tracker we invite you to join us on a dedicated chat channel here: https://gitter.im/fossasia/visdom. Login with GitHub, Gitlab or Twitter is required.

Where else is information about the next steps and the roadmap?

For technical discussions the issue tracker is the best place. To stay up to date about general project developments please follow us on:

Continue ReadingWelcome the Visdom Project at FOSSASIA Now Fully Open Source
Read more about the article How to ask questions to solve a setup or development problem as a Newcomer in Open Source

How to ask questions to solve a setup or development problem as a Newcomer in Open Source

We see a lot of new users coming up and asking questions, which is great. But a lot of people ask “Can I ask a question?” which leads to an unnecessary indirection that “Yes, you can”. Or they say “Can anyone help me?”, “I’m having a problem” without mentioning their problem or even if they mention the problem “I cannot setup the project. It throws an error”, then they don’t mention the error. This leads to a loop of repeated question answers.

  • Please ask the question in the message itself
  • Mention what is the problem
  • Mention what you tried
  • Mention what failed
  • Mention the error with the exact error message/screenshot of the failure

To save both your and maintainer’s time in solving your issue.
Please read this: https://jvns.ca/blog/good-questions/

Also, respect time zones, people’s personal space, and time and realize that most people help others voluntarily. They are in different timezone than you and may take hours before replying. Use public channels so that even others may answer your questions, don’t spam and be patient, they may reply in their own time when they feel comfortable.

And also answer other’s questions if you know the solution.

“Now that you’ve read all the issues and pull requests, start to watch for questions that you can answer. It won’t take too long before you notice that someone is asking a question that’s been answered before, or that’s answered in the docs that you just read. Answer the questions you know how to answer.”

— Andre Arko.net

Please join us to ask your question or answer a question of contributor on our channel at https://gitter.im/fossasia/fossasia

Continue ReadingHow to ask questions to solve a setup or development problem as a Newcomer in Open Source
Read more about the article Let’s Collaborate on Open Solutions at FOSSASIA

Let’s Collaborate on Open Solutions at FOSSASIA

The FOSSASIA Summit 2020 in March already feels like an eternity away. With support from many contributors and sponsors we were able to pull off the event despite all the challenges. Thank you!

It has been impossible for FOSS contributors and Open Source companies since to organize in-person events, meet developers or collaborate on projects face to face.

There is not just a pandemic crisis happening right now, we see a violent political crisis in many regions of the world and also the climate crisis continues to affect people everywhere. These crises show more than ever that – just like in the FOSS community – we need everyone to collaborate on a global scale and to solve problems together with an open on all layers approach.

Below is some information on solutions we are working on at FOSSASIA and how we can team up in the Codeheat coding contest.

Let’s make Virtual Events Use Only FOSS/Open Source!

Currently we are integrating our hosted open source event solution with online video tools such as Jitsi or Big Blue Button. Right now many organizers depend on proprietary tools to run virtual events. Let’s change that. Check out the latest features of Open Event on eventyay.com, have a look at some of the upcoming events and sign up!

Let’s Develop Together and Share our Knowledge in Codeheat

We are running more and more activities online and we are adapting our annual coding contest Codeheat. We support participants by providing “Ask Me Anything” online support sessions, giving out more prizes every two months and extending the overall time of the contest until June 2021. Please join now at codeheat.org or contact us if your company would like to sponsor the program.

Let’s Make Science Truly Open Again with Pocket Science Lab

At FOSSASIA we believe it is only possible to solve our global issues by giving everyone access to open knowledge and tools. For this reason we are working on the miniaturization of science tools by developing the open hardware Pocket Science Lab.

Our goal is to create a science measurement device that is easy to handle, easy to transport, and easy to use. And of course it must fulfill the promise of science to provide every aspect of science openly starting with the hardware and software that collects data.

The PSLab can be connected to a smartphone and extend its capabilities. It enables everyone to collect data through sensors, control robots and to exchange data easily. Currently we are in the final steps of prototyping the next version which will come with an SD Card, on board real time clock, optional WiFi, Bluetooth, or Lora extensions, sleeping mode for datalogging and much more.

To learn more please download and test the project and start contributing to the repositories. Our weekly open hardware meetings take place every Saturday.
 

Continue ReadingLet’s Collaborate on Open Solutions at FOSSASIA
Read more about the article FOSSASIA Summit 2020 Takes Places as Online and Offline Event

FOSSASIA Summit 2020 Takes Places as Online and Offline Event

Due to the Corona crisis it is clear that events like the FOSSASIA Summit cannot be run in the usual way with large crowds. Therefore this year the FOSSASIA Summit will only be possible as a smaller gathering with social distancing in Singapore and online interactions from Thursday, March 19 – Saturday, March 21. 

Even with travel restrictions in place a number of speakers are in Singapore and expressed their wish sharing their knowledge and the FOSSASIA team is working hard to facilitate this in a safe space offline and online. Due to ongoing changes we will conduct the event with both unscheduled and scheduled sessions. The program will be updated continuously here.

The Lifelong Learning Institute, our host and co-organizer, adjusted the venue to ensure the safety and health of all. To participate on-premise you need to pass a screening test and follow directions for hygiene measures. The sign up is here. 

Singapore has an outstanding record seen internationally as a gold standard when it comes to cleanliness, hygiene and health. Additional measures in the LLI include providing entrance screening tests, social distancing, using open spaces, reducing the use of mics and mic disinfection, avoiding close group photos. Please find a list of measures here.

The events of our time show more than ever that we need to collaborate to solve the world’s problems such as climate change, global health issues, poverty and economic challenges. The FOSS/Open Source community has proven that we are able to overcome differences and work together across countries and cultures. It is important that we stay connected and continue our work be it offline or online. To connect virtually during the FOSSASIA Summit you can join us on these channels:

We will share more details about sessions in the upcoming days. Furthermore, we are planning additional online events at a later time this year. Let’s continue and build a better world through learning and sharing where-ever and however we can!

We would like to thank everyone who supported us throughout these challenges around the event – our speakers, friends, supporters, and partners like Google, Facebook, Arm, and Elastic.

We hope to stay connected. All the best and stay healthy!

FOSSASIA Presentations
FOSSASIA Videographers
Continue ReadingFOSSASIA Summit 2020 Takes Places as Online and Offline Event
Read more about the article Announcing the FOSSASIA Codeheat Winners 2019/20

Announcing the FOSSASIA Codeheat Winners 2019/20

We are very happy to announce our Grand Prize Winners and Finalist Winners of Codeheat 2019/2020.

Codeheat participants solved a stunning number of issues in FOSSASIA’s projects, reviewed pull requests, shared scrums, and wrote blog posts, but most importantly they encouraged and helped each other and collaborated across borders and cultures. More than 800 developers from 19 countries participated in the contest supported by more than 30 mentors. Over 2000 pull requests were merged. Thank you all for this amazing achievement!

With so many excellent developers participating it was extremely difficult to decide the Grand Prize and Finalist Winners of the contest. Our winners stand out in particular as they contributed to FOSSASIA projects on a continuously high level following our Best Practices.

Each of the Grand Prize Winners is awarded a travel grant to join us at the FOSSASIA Summit in Singapore in March where they receive the official Codeheat award, and meet with mentors and FOSSASIA developers. Other Finalist Winners will receive travel support vouchers to go to a Free and Open Source Software event of their choice.

Congratulations to our Grand Prize Winners, Finalist Winners, and all of the participants who spent the last few of months learning, sharing and contributing to Free and Open Source Projects. Well-done! We are truly impressed by your work, your progress and advancement. The winners are (in alphabetical order):

Grand Prize Winners

Kush Trivedi
Prateek Jain
Suneet Srivastava

Finalist Winners

A.Dilshaad
Dheeraj Kotwani
Nitin Kumar
Pulkit Kashyap
Robin Singh
Sundaram Dubey
Shantnu Kumar

About Codeheat

Codeheat is an online coding contest organized by FOSSASIA and OpnTec annually from September to February since 2016. Grand prize winners are invited to present their work at the FOSSASIA OpenTechSummit in Singapore every March and receive travel funding to attend. Mentors and the Codeheat jury choose three winners from the top 10 contributors according to code quality and relevance of commits for the project. The jury also takes other contributions like submitted scrum reports and technical blog posts into account. Other participants have the chance to win Tshirts, Swag and vouchers to attend Open Tech events in their region and get certificates of participation.

Thank you Mentors and Supporters

Our mentors and many project developers, the heart and soul of Codeheat, are the reason the contest thrives. Mentors volunteer their time to help participants become open source contributors. Mentors spend hundreds of hours during answering questions, reviewing submitted code, and welcoming the new developers to project. Codeheat would not be possible without their patience and tireless efforts. Learn more about this year’s mentors on the Codeheat website.

Certificate of Participation

Participating developers, mentors and the FOSSASIA admin team learnt so much and it was an amazing and enriching experience and we believe the learnings are the main take-away of the program. We hope to see everyone continuing their contributions, sharing what they have learnt with others and to seize the opportunity to develop their code profile with FOSSASIA. We want to work together with the Open Tech community to improve people’s lives and create a better world for all. As a participating developer or mentor, you will receive your certificate over the upcoming weeks. Thank you!

More Links

Continue ReadingAnnouncing the FOSSASIA Codeheat Winners 2019/20
Read more about the article FOSSASIA Confirms Annual Summit Takes Place from March 19-21 + DevSprints on March 22 at Lifelong Learning Institute in Singapore

FOSSASIA Confirms Annual Summit Takes Place from March 19-21 + DevSprints on March 22 at Lifelong Learning Institute in Singapore

We are glad to announce that the annual FOSSASIA Summit will take place from 19-21 March and the DevSprints on March 22, 2020 at the Lifelong Learning Institute (LLI) in Singapore after official meetings confirming that relevant measures are put in place to ensure the health and safety after the Covid-19 crisis.

Singapore has been widely praised in the International community for preventing the spread of the virus, a Harvard study hails the country as a gold standard for case detection. 

The FOSSASIA organization and LLI are following all recommendations of the Ministry of Health and taking necessary measures throughout the event. These include among others: Carrying out temperature screening for all attendees, providing health information on each day, adding prominent notices at entrances about hygiene measures, that are put in place throughout the venue, offering excellent bathroom and hand washing facilities, providing free disinfectants, increasing the frequency of cleaning of commonly used areas and more. 

Everyone can help to prevent the spread by following hygiene measures and regularly washing hands. The FAQ of the ministry of health is a good starting point to learn more about the virus and how Singapore is stopping its spreading.

The FOSSASIA Summit program will be online next week. We are happy that we are able to run the event with the help of the Lifelong Learning Institute and we cannot wait to see you in Singapore! 

Global issues, pollution, the threat of climate change, new illnesses, lack of education and poverty show more than ever that it is vital that we all work together to save the planet. Only through open collaboration and sharing can we solve the problems of the world. We need to meet and share our experiences. Events like the FOSSASIA Summit are an important platform. Rest assured we are taking all necessary steps to ensure the continued health and safety of all participants at the event.

More information on the FOSSASIA Summit 2020 is here.

Please check out a list of confirmed speakers and sessions.

Communities interested in running a DevSprint on Sunday, March 22 can still register here.

See you in Singapore!

Continue ReadingFOSSASIA Confirms Annual Summit Takes Place from March 19-21 + DevSprints on March 22 at Lifelong Learning Institute in Singapore
Read more about the article Introducing MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) Architecture in Phimpme Android App
Introducing MVVM in Phimpme

Introducing MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) Architecture in Phimpme Android App

Phimpme Android App an image editor app that aims to replace proprietary photographing and image apps on smartphones. It offers features such as taking photos, adding filters, editing images and uploading them to social networks. The app was using MVP(Model-View-Presenter) architecture and is now being ported to MVVM(Model-View-ViewModel) architecture.

Advantages of MVVM over MVP?

  1. The view model is lifecycle aware and only updates the UI based on the lifecycle of the activity/fragment.
  2. Separation of concerns – Not all the code under one single activity
  3. Loose coupling – Activity depends on ViewModel and ViewModel depends on the Repository and not the other way around.

MVVM?

  1. Model – Model represents the data and business logic of the app. The repository can be seen as a model in an MVVM architecture which contains login to fetch the data from an API or a remote API
  2. ViewModel – The view model creates a reference with Model/Repository and gets the data for the UI. It delivers the data to UI via observers of LiveData and also the ViewModel is lifecycle aware and respects the lifecycle of the activity such as screen rotations that don’t cause the ViewModel to be created again.
  3. View – The Activity/Fragment is the view where the data is shown to the user, the View creates a reference to the ViewModel via ViewModel provider class. Hence it listens to the ViewModel callbacks via LiveData.

Process for inclusion

  1. Add ViewModel and LiveData

    implementation "androidx.lifecycle:lifecycle-extensions:$rootProject.lifecycleVersion"

  2. Now create a class AccountViewModel – it will perform all the functioning that will drive the UI of the Account Activity. We will use LiveData for observing the data in the activity

    public class AccountViewModel extends ViewModel {
    private AccountRepository accountRepository
    = new AccountRepository();
    MutableLiveData<RealmQuery<AccountDatabase>>accountDetails = new MutableLiveData<>();//live data 
    }

  3. Create a class AccountRepository – Used to perform the DB related operations and the ViewModel will hold the instance of this repository.

    class AccountRepository {
    private Realm realm = Realm.getDefaultInstance();
    private DatabaseHelper databaseHelper = new DatabaseHelper(realm);// Fetches the details of all accounts present in database
    RealmQuery<AccountDatabase> fetchAllAccounts() {
    return databaseHelper.fetchAccountDetails();
     }
    }

  4. Now we will add the functionality in AccountViewModel to fetch accounts for the UI

    public class AccountViewModel extends ViewModel {
     final int RESULT_OK = 1;
    private AccountRepository accountRepository = new AccountRepository();
    MutableLiveData<Boolean> error = new MutableLiveData<>();
    MutableLiveData<RealmQuery<AccountDatabase>> accountDetails = new MutableLiveData<>();
    public AccountViewModel() {}
    // Used to fetch all the current logged in accounts
    void fetchAccountDetails() {
       RealmQuery<AccountDatabase> accountDetails = accountRepository.fetchAllAccounts();
    if (accountDetails.findAll().size() > 0) {
         this.accountDetails.postValue(accountDetails);
    } else {
     error.postValue(true);
    }
    }

  5. Now in the AccountActivity, we will have the reference of ViewModel and then observe the liveData error and accountDetails

    public class AccountActivity extends ThemedActivityimplements RecyclerItemClickListner.OnItemClickListener {

    private AccountViewModel accountViewModel;

    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    ButterKnife.bind(this);
    ActivitySwitchHelper.setContext(this);
    setSupportActionBar(toolbar);
    //fetching the viewmodel from ViewModelProviders
    accountViewModel = ViewModelProviders.of(this).get(AccountViewModel.class);
    initObserver();
    }

    private void initObserver() {
    accountViewModel.error.observe(this, value -> {
    if (value) {
     SnackBarHandler.create(coordinatorLayout, getString(no_account_signed_in)).show();
    showComplete();
    }
     });
    accountViewModel.accountDetails.observe(this, this::setUpAdapter);
    }

Hence, this completes the implementation of MVVM Architecture in the Phimpme app.

Resources 

  1. Guide to App Architecture – Android Developers Blog
  2. ViewModel Overview – Android Developers Blog
  3. LiveData Overview – Android Developers Blog

Link to the Issue: https://github.com/fossasia/phimpme-android/issues/2889
Link to the PR: https://github.com/fossasia/phimpme-android/pull/2890

Continue ReadingIntroducing MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) Architecture in Phimpme Android App