Six months ago Forum Nokia released Projects, a free online projects hosting with integrated version control, discussion forums, ticketing and other tools allowing complete project management and collaboration among developers worldwide.

After six months, 1000 registered developers, 460 projects, many updates, today Projects goes officially out of beta.

If you still haven’t tried out Forum Nokia Projects, you can start exploring the projects created and maintained by Forum Nokia itself, as these:

• Notifications API
• Nokia Data Gathering
• Ovi Maps Rendering API

How many of you have already started or joined a project? What’s your opinion about this tool?

With the recent Qt WRT announcement, mobile web developers gain a new tool to build powerful web apps for Qt-based platforms. In this conversation, Nokia Devs asks Wai Seto, from Forum Nokia, what Qt WRT is all about and what developers should expect from it.

ND: Welcome Wai, please tell us a bit about yourself.

Hi, My name is Wai Seto working Forum Nokia as Technical Marketeer evangelizing and executing Nokia Web development offering. I have started this role last year, and prior to that I have been software architect for web and Internet related products on Nokia devices. Love to interact with developers who are interested in developing for Nokia, so please connect with me and chat. Check the Forum Nokia Web Talk blog or find me in twitter @waiseto.

ND: We’ve seen the recent launch of Qt WRT: can you tell us what it is?

On Jul 19 2010, Qt WRT was announced to be open sourced and part of Qt’s new open governance model. It is a technology component that is of interest to OEM’s, operators, and other platform development professionals with an interest in open source and expanding the capabilities of web applications.

ND: Which advantages does it bring over standard Qt hybrid development?

Qt hybrid development is a powerful way of programming. It has the best of both C++ and Web world. However, hybrid program does request some level of C++ development knowledge. Qt WTR is completely Web based, and requires no C++ skills.

ND: Talking about APIs: which ones are supported today? Are you working on integrating new APIs in next releases?

Calendar, Camera, Filesystem, Location, Media Messaging, Sensor, Syst Info, and telephony are included in the current package. We think these are the right set of device API for now. Plus Qt WRT1.1 support HTML5 and CSS3 features such as canvas, local storage and CSS transition. As the technology is open sourced, new improvement will be visible to public.

ND: Will Qt WRT be integrated in MeeGo releases?

At this point, the Qt WTR is part of Qt open source governance model. Qt is designed to work on multiple platforms including MeeGo. According to the MeeGo architecture page there will be a Web runtime component based on Qt, but not in 1.0. Please wait for future MeeGo announcement for details.

ND: Will it be possible to distribute Qt WRT apps through the Ovi Store?

This announcement is about Qt WRT technology going to open source under Qt platform. When the Qt WRT technology is available on Nokia devices, we will make the appropriate announcement about the Ovi Store support.

ND: Where can developers find more information about Qt WRT, to start developing widgets?

To get started, download the release from http://get.qt.nokia.com/qtwrt . Source code and examples are available there. Also discussion you questions and comment in the QtWRT Forum.

If you have more questions about Qt WRT, you can leave a comment here or on the official announcement page.

As many of you already know, Forum Nokia has recently launched a new free tool for project management: Forum Nokia Projects. Nokia Devs asked Andrea Trasatti, from Nokia, to explain which are the main features of this tool and which benefits it brings to developers.

ND: Welcome Andrea, please tell us a bit about yourself.

Hello, my name is Andrea Trasatti and I have recently joined Nokia, in May 2010, specifically. I have been working in the mobile space for 10 years now and of course my first experiences were with Nokia phones. The 7110 that many did not like still has a special place in my heart, in particular the roller that seemed so appropriate to scroll pages quickly.

ND: What is Forum Nokia Projects?

Forum Nokia Projects is not a new idea, it is something Forum Nokia has been evaluating for a few years now, considering if it would be appropriate to start (yet another) project hosting service.

Early this year the company decided that it was worth it and that developers would have had a consistent benefit. I was hired to manage the community around the service, reason being that Forum Nokia thinks there will be many developers and end-users taking advantage of it.
In three words Projects is a “project management tool” for open source software, but not only and of course focuses around mobile. Forum Nokia, as you probably know, is about helping the growth of mobile services, Web, native applications, widgets, etc. Projects wants to help developers to better manage their software and also have an easy way to connect to their users.

ND: Why should developers use Projects?

Projects offers all the standard tools that you would expect to manage your software in all its life-cycle, we have a wiki, tickets, version control, discussion boards, etc.

On top of that we add something that hardly anyone else can offer, the great community of Forum Nokia that is composed of professional developers and hobbyists that might very well be interested in participating in your project or be your users.

If that was not enough, we offer better visibility. Forum Nokia is the best display for any mobile project. We have started in July with what we called the MVMP, i.e. the Most Valuable Projects Member of the month, and of course we will have a new one every month. This will give visibility both to individuals and their projects. We promote the MVPM on Forum Nokia and we plan to use the software (with the owner’s permission of course) in other materials that Forum Nokia will produce in the future.

Projects should also be a way to connect to users of your software, so we expect a lot of casual visitors that will download and test software and of course comment and send feedback.

ND: Which are the main available features?

Projects is built on top of Trac, a well known project management software that has been in development for years. Trac comes with all the most common features that you would expect, tickets, wiki and integration with SVN.
We wanted to give power and flexibility to our developers and we developed a plugin that allows us to have multiple projects within a single Trac install (something that is not available out of the box) and we installed a number of plugins such as the ability to also use Git and Mercurial as SCM’s, we installed and improved the discussion boards and we offer webDAV access.
One small feature that comes with the support of multiple projects is also the ability of making your project private. Most of the other hosting services require that your project is open source and completely public. We also allow for private projects, we thought this would be very helpful for people that want to have a team of members to help him and we hope that eventually it will be turned into a public project. Of course a public project has better visibility.

All Projects’ contents are also indexed by the Forum Nokia’s search engine (and all other search engines), so every time a user is looking for something on Forum Nokia they will also find a project in our service if that matches the search query.

ND: Are you working on new features and/or improvements for the near future?

We have launched our public beta in mid-June and our goal is to have a final release after the summer. We are working on many tweaks and improvements, but our focus now is to provide a system that is powerful and easy to use.

In accordance to what we think are the key advantages of Projects, we are working to make sure that project owners can create really good sites around their projects, so improvements to the project homepage, to the permissions system, the design and so on.
In the near future we want to give access to information about how the project is going, so show pretty graphs of visitors, commits to the repository and downloads.

ND: Can you show us some cool hosted projects?

We were overwhelmed by the number of projects that were created in less than a month, so naming 2 or 3 is too little, so I really suggest that you check out our homepage where for example the newest and the most active projects are listed.

One project that I particularly like is QtMirror, it’s quite simple in its idea and yet the owner has created a nice site and is working on bringing new features soon. Link: https://projects.forum.nokia.com/QtMirror
I like going hiking and walking, so another personal favourite of mine is Kinematics, born as a tool to track your cycling, but of course you can apply it to anything. Just turn it on and it will record your position over time and show you on a map your trail. Link: https://projects.forum.nokia.com/kinematics

Forum Nokia is also using Projects to host our own software, for example you can see the QtQuickPlayground (link: https://projects.forum.nokia.com/qtquickplayground) and the Cartoon Reader (Link: https://projects.forum.nokia.com/CartoonReader) that are sample applications we developed. The difference is that starting from now developers and users can also communicate directly with the teams that were involved, ask questions and suggest improvements. We plan to continue doing so and we want the community to be more active.