Desktop App Barcamp under the sun

As a distributed team, we love to get together several time per year to work on new things and have great time in cool places. Last week, I had the pleasure to receive a part of the OpenPaaS (OP) team in the south of France, in Agde near my hometown.
For the first time, we decided to also have ‘guests’ with us by inviting some LinShare team members to share our knowledge, get feedback from them and hack together.

When we decided to organize this barcamp a few months ago, the first subject we wanted to work on was to build a desktop application for OP. Due to the number of attendees of the barcamp (10), we also decided to work on the ‘offline’ mode: You must be able to continue to work with the desktop application even if you are out of network, don’t you?

The cool thing is that most of OP is implemented in JavaScript, and guess what? We decided to use the awesome Electron framework to build the desktop app. While a part of the team worked on how to package OP as a desktop app and how to add some value to the Web version using Electron APIs, another team worked on the offline module (and first integrated in the calendar module). More details on how we implemented all this stuff is coming later this week in some new articles, so stay tuned.

We all agreed that this barcamp is almost a total success:

• We have a new offline module in OP with a first integration in the calendar module (you can create and update events while offline, they will be sent to the platform once online). More details here.
• The desktop app needs a little more work for some cleanup, but we are able to package OP and have it running on all platforms (Linux, Windows, OS X). Bonus point: We also have system packages and Windows installer. You will find a dedicated Medium article about it here.
• The working environment was more than cool: huge house, big swimming pool, beach, jacuzzi, ping-pong table, BBQ, nice food, a few drinks…
• We were really happy to be together and to have LinShare guys onboard. LinShare guys were also happy to meet and work on OP features, well done guys! They also share their first barcamp feedback here.

If you want to be part of this amazing adventure, we are always looking for new people to join us, have a look to our job offers on https://jobs.linagora.com, drop us a line on Twitter, Facebook or send an issue on GitHub.