perspective

An open-source, context-aware, event based team communication tool designed with emphasis on software development teams.

Installation

1. Download and install RethinkDB if you haven't already
2. npm install -g perspectiveapp

Usage

1. Run rethinkdb in one shell/process
2. Run perspectiveapp in another shell/process

Configuration

See lib/server/config.js for the default configuration. You may override these settings by creating a custom configuration file with the same structure and placing it under ~/.perspective/config.json

FAQ

How is Perspective different from Slack, HipChat et. al?

Perspective is open-source and free to use, even for on-site installations behind pesky firewalls. Also, while there is a long way to go, Perspective aims to be more than chat by providing the right information at the right time to the right user. Examples:

• Present key events on a dashboard suitable on a TV for your whole team to see
• Switch the dashboard into a special mode during stand-ups to provide the most relevant information
• A view of Stash/Jenkins branch and build jobs as a separate overview page (in addition to being posted in relevant chat rooms)
• A view of the currently installed applications and versions in different server environments (in addition to deploy notifications in chat rooms)

What's the high level architectural ideas?

• "Everything" is an event. A chat message is simply an event of a specific type. Similar a build job on Jenkins will be an event of another type. Integrations will be able to format events in a chat room, hook into "dashboards", create its own menu entries, listen for other events to produce new events and more.

Is it stable?

Not at all. Yet :)

Contribute

Contributions are most welcome! Simply open an issue or create a pull request.

Development

1. Install RethinkDB
2. Clone this repo
3. npm install
4. Run npm run watch (npm run watch:server -- -- --verbose for debug logging)

• See npm run for a list of other options.
• Run perspective.debugLoggingOn() to enable client-side debug logging

Todos

Will be migrated to github issues eventually

• api
  • stable events api for creating events via REST (validation)
• stash
  • aging of pull-requests
• events
  • error handling LOAD_EVENTS
  • event-store: sliding window? Evict old events to keep memory from building up
• chat
  • don't scroll to bottom automatically if user has scrolled up
  • set status (online/away)
  • set status automatically to idle
  • support @here, @channel, @everyone , @username
  • support "... is typing"
  • support drag'n'drop files
  • support copy/pasting and embedding images
  • support code snippets
  • detect and convert http links
  • append message clientside immediately, but implement "failed to deliver message" or similar if connection fails
  • security: allow plugins to format using HTML, but prevent XSS (see message.react)
• ui
  • get a delicious design
• create startupscripts

Licence

Perspective is released under the MIT License.