ECHOWAVES

echowaves is an opensource Social Group Chat.

EchoWaves is a Collaboration Tool and a Social Network. EchoWaves is as powerful as CampFire, and as simple to use as Twitter. It's built around conversations (convos) rather than users. Isn't it more natural for humans to socialize around convos?

Why one more Collaboration Tools? After all we already have meebo.com and campfire and many others like facebook.com and such. They all are great, but... none of them fits our needs 100%, and none of them is open-source.

Basically this tool could be an important addition to an agile team, specially to a geographically distributed one. We all know the importance of communication which could be difficult if people are not in the same room, or when someone walks out for few minutes...

If you'd like to contribute, perhaps start by picking a task from the issues list at: http://code.google.com/p/echowaves/issues/list

INSTALL (localhost)

copy config/database.yml-sample to config/database.yml and modify to taste (see below for some hints on different platforms)

rake gems:install                         # automatically installs gems referenced in config/environment.rb
rake db:create                            # creates the development database
rake db:migrate                           # creates tables in dev DB

rake thinking_sphinx:configure            # Generate the Sphinx configuration file using Thinking Sphinx's settings
                                          # this will generate config/development.sphinx.conf, modify for your setup

SERVER SIDE COMPONENT INSTALL

install python

sudo apt-get install python2.5-dev
sudo apt-get install python2.5-twisted

install orbited (http://orbited.org/wiki/Installation)

easy_install orbited

install simplejson

easy_install simplejson

copy orbited config file

cp config/orbited.cfg /etc/

install stomp gem

sudo gem install stomp

(stomp gem will be prompted for by the entry in config/environment.rb)

update gem sources

gem sources -a http://gems.github.com

note:

for oauth gem make sure to have 0.3.2 version installed –– the only version that works. If you already have it installed, make sure to uninstall it "sudo gem uninstall oauth", then install "sudo gem install oauth --version=0.3.2"

install ImageMagick You can install it quite easily via apt, yum, or port, or the package manager of your choice.

install sphinx from http://sphinxsearch.com/

SERVING ATTACHMENTS

Attachments are send to the browser by a rails controller to protect them for unauthorized access, the problem is that this is very inefficient. However you can let your web server to do the hard work, for this, you must enable the x-sendfile module and set the USE_X_SENDFILE constant in #{RAILS_ROOT}/configuration/initializers/constants.rb if you use Apache or the USE_X_ACCEL_REDIRECT constant if you use NGINX

USE_X_SENDFILE = true # if you use Apache                                          
USE_X_ACCEL_REDIRECT = true # if you use NGINX

If you use NGINX and the x_accel_redirect feature you should tell NGINX about where the attachments are located:

location /files {
  root /path/to/rails_app;  
  internal;  
}

ASYNCRONOUS JOBS

If you want to make some tasks asyncronous, set the USE_WORKLING constant in environment.rb to true. By default we are using RudeQ for store the jobs in the db, so no extra proccess to take care.

To start processing jobs, run

script/workling_client start

POST INSTALL

Index data for Sphinx using Thinking Sphinx's settings (this rake task will create the settings file at #{RAILS_ROOT}/configuration/development.sphinx.conf)

rake thinking_sphinx:index

You will see a warning like the following – it’s safe to ignore, it’s just Sphinx being overly fussy. It tries to index all indexes, including distributed ones – which never need to be indexed, so it’s nothing to worry about:

"distributed index 'article' can not be directly indexed; skipping."

Start a Sphinx searchd daemon using Thinking Sphinx's settings

rake thinking_sphinx:start

Then start the delayed_job for re-index the database for changed records

rake ts:dd

Also – you can run the index task while Sphinx is running, and it’ll reload the indexes automatically. Prior to 0.9.9 though, Sphinx doesn’t reload the configuration file, so if you’ve changed your index structure or other Sphinx settings, you will need to stop and start it for those changes to take effect.

setup a cron tab to run "rake thinking_sphinx:index" periodically or do it manually when you need it

SignUp as a new user. Activate the user by copy-pasting the activation URL from the debug log into the address field of your browser and hit enter.

To actually get the actionmailer stuff sent, you'll need to change the SMTP settings in config/environment.rb In that case, you'll probably want to comment out the (currently last) line in config/environments/development.rb that reads:

"config.action_mailer.raise_delivery_errors = false"

so that actionmailer failures are more visible.

LOCALIZATION

We are using Rails I18n, and javascript_i18n for localization. The javascript localization is generated from the rails one (in config/locales) by running the next rake task:

rake js:i18n:build

REPORTING ISSUES

If you find an issue or would like to make a suggestion on what functionality you would like to see in echowaves, you can do it at the echowaves issues tracker

Specific advice for different platforms and setups

WINDOWS

To use this with MySQL, you will probably need to uncomment the lines in the database.yml file that say "Host: 127.0.0.1". The error when this isn't put in is not particularly helpful, so if you're having trouble, give it a try.

SQLITE3

change the "adapter" lines to read "adapter: sqlite3" make the database lines something like "database: db/development.sqlite3" and "database: db/test.sqlite3"