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Tech News

By Smile Cornerstone Team • Issue #6 • View online
I hope you all had a nice summer break and get back to work with your batteries refilled to the max 🔋⚡️A lot of things have happened since the last tech news 🤯 and I do hope everything can fit in this edition today 🤞

Organization with the new CTO Office is taking off and Communities of Practice are now pretty well in place leading to a fast pace of improvements and capitalization 🚀.

Rapidly the key highlights of this edition are, first, the birth of two new assets: The Modern Front kit which aims at streamlining the way we develop user interfaces when we use headless backends, and the Streamlined CMS which is packaged Drupal for simple projects that only need some simple customisation and have low budget. We are also spreading the usage of Blackfire 🎉 to help spot performance bottlenecks and improve the quality of delivered projects and some new tools are in the works that will help teams manage dependency tracking and especially CVEs monitoring for these dependencies. But there’s a lot more so carefully read through!

🏷️ I also wanted to draw your attention to the fact that tags were introduced in Gescom and that now we will be using this to dispatch people in communities of practice. It’s important that you tag new smilians with a COP tag so it’s easy to identify and reach everyone in a given community and ease sharing of information.
We are also pretty well advanced in the Skills Matrix tool that will be the foundation to better identify the skills available in the group. The graph database and the exposed API are getting close to final and the Gescom development should start soon after. Our plan is to release the tool before the end of the year.

But maybe the most prominent news to take away this time is the creation of an offer dedicated to Generative AI, thanks to the work of Guillaume Lanthier, Lionel Regis-Constant and Alain Rouen 👏🎉🚀. Since the end of last year, we have been monitoring this impressive topic, tried the technology and even organized a hackathon. I posted an article on LinkedIn earlier this year, followed by others from Alain and Lionel that I encourage you to read. We have been doing AI at Smile since 2018 but this time marks a turning point where AI is at reach for any company even with a small set of data. More information on this here and this video presentation made by Thibault Milan (in french but there’s an english version).

That’s it for me, on to this autumn Tech News content!

- Fabrice Dewasmes,
Chief Technology and Innovation Officer
⏳ Reading time: 10 minutes

🎖️What’s new in the CoP?

JS

ModernFront Kit:
  • We are currently making great strides in the first crucial phase of developing UI components that can function independently of the backend. This groundbreaking initiative is well underway and shows no signs of slowing down.
  • As we forge ahead, the second pivotal step of creating the very first connector is receiving careful consideration. Our primary objective is to seamlessly integrate the remarkable UI components with the powerful Alfresco platform, ensuring a seamless and efficient user experience.
Exciting News! The Eslint Smile configuration project has just received a fantastic update. Check it out now on GitHub: https://github.com/Smile-SA/eslint-plugin-smile
Drupal
Our team is excited to introduce Streamlined CMS, a Drupal-based solution designed to enhance the content contribution experience for our customers. Primarily targeting sitebuilders and content editors, Streamlined CMS offers a library of easily manageable components and a suite of modules for content composition and editing. This standard solution will enable faster project delivery with a focus on editorial contribution, ensuring optimal quality, accessibility, and performance.

The CMS will be showcased at DrupalCon Lille 2023 from 17th to 20th October.
E-Commerce

Magento / Adobe Commerce
Modules updated this year : 

Smile Dataflow (V2): The successor to the Smile Dataflow (V1) and Smile Connector modules, this module makes it easy to create file or API data exchanges between Magento/Adobe and other application bricks. Don't hesitate to read the Wiki page to understand the ins and outs. Compatible Magento 2.4.6

Smile Quality Suite: This module guarantees application code quality and compliance with best practices. It is installed by default via the boilerplate and can be added to any existing project. Magento 2.4.6 compatible
  • Note: An option is available to ask it to audit only the new project code and not the existing code, so you don't have to rework all the existing code.
  • A MUST HAVE for all your projects
Smile Debug Toolbar: This module, installed by default via the boilerplate, supports developers in the creation of E-Commerce platforms. This toolbar displays useful information on the latest executions, including redirects, Ajax calls, WebApi calls and ESI calls. It lets you analyze SQL queries, page layouts, plugins and more. Compatible Magento 2.4.6

Smile Custom Entity: This module makes it possible to manage additional entities on a Magento (such as brands, for example) and link them to products via the additional module provided for this purpose. An additional module was also created this year to import Akeneo referential entities into Custom Entity. Magento 2.4.5 (or even 2.4.6) compatible

Smile Retailer Suite: This module enables you to manage physical stores on your E-Commerce platform, with features such as a Store Locator, store pages, product offers per store, Click&Collect, etc. Magento 2.4.5 compatible, Magento 2.4.6 compatibility in progress

Coming next : 

Smile Warm up Cache: This module uses the Magento sitemap to crawl the site's pages and warm up the associated Varnish cache. This module is currently being analyzed and will be repatriated to Smile's Magento2 Gitlab to become an official Smile module.

OneStock Connector: A OneStock module is currently being created by Smile teams to interconnect OneStock and Magento/Adobe Commerce. This capitalized module will be used for all future omnichannel projects with these two solutions. The scope of this first version of the module : 
  • Import of unified FULL & DIFF stocks into Magento
  • Export of Magento orders to OneStock
  • Import of order updates into Magento
Shopware
This year, the brilliant minds at Magento, Sylius, and Elasticsuite teams conducted a thorough technical analysis to uncover the inner workings of this Symfony-based solution. Their verdict? Positive feedback all around! This means that Smile Group highly recommends considering this solution for your future E-Commerce projects.

Exciting news from Germany! The https://www.comazo.de/ website is currently in the midst of its first Shopware project.

But wait, there's more! The talented teams at Elasticsuite have gone above and beyond by creating a Gally-Shopware connector. 

ORO Commerce
Exciting News! ORO has just unveiled an amazing certification program that offers not one, but two distinct certifications: business and developer. And guess what? You can sign up for free! Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to showcase your skills and earn your well-deserved badge.

Ready to take your career to the next level? Simply follow this link https://academy.oroinc.com/certifications/ to get started. Remember to reach out to your manager and Benoit Dubuc (COP leader at ORO) if you're planning to pursue the certification. We can't wait to hear from you once you've achieved it!

Don't wait any longer – seize this chance to demonstrate your expertise and boost your professional profile. Sign up now and let the world know that you're a certified ORO professional!
Symfony
A brand new component “Feature Toggle” was suggested to Symfony. It is developed by Adrien ROCHES (SensioLabs)  and Hubert LENOIR (SensioLabs) This component is about managing enabling/disabling features on a Symfony project based on some rules. The component is still in discussion, you can follow its status on this Pull Request link.

To continue on the open source momentum, Hubert LENOIR will give to the COP a talk about contributing to Symfony. Please find more information here.

Same as last year the forum php conference, will take place on 12-13th of October…..aaaaaand we have a speaker ! Mathéo DANINOS (SensioLabs) will give a talk about doing frontend width Symfony ! 
Embedded
Our participation in conferences (couple in EN, rest is in FR):
  • TechNonTech Conference: Qu’est que l’open-source 
  • Embedded and Open Source Summit: Using Linux as an Embedded OS for the Space Industry
  • Embedded and Open Source Summit: The Xenomai project : current and future
  • TechNonTech Conference: Qu'est qu'une distribution
  • TechNonTech Conference: Clés, chiffrage, certificats
  • TechNonTech Conference: Mise à jour des système embarqués
The LinuxEmbedded blog (exclusively FR content)
  • Intégration d'un compilateur dans Yocto
  • Économie d'énergie avec Linux
  • Réaliser une sonnette connectée LoRa avec chirpstack
  • Trustzone ARM
Our opensource contributions

In the Buildroot project, Romain NAOUR has been notably active, contributing to various tasks including fixing the TestPolkitSystemd exit code check, updating test_edk2 to support binutils 2.39+, migrating python-gpiozero to setup.cfg, and enhancing several packages like qemu and crudini.

Sebastian WEYER made updates to basetest.py, leveraging the Bootlin toolchain. For Yocto Cooker, Yoann CONGAL documented the cooker shell command, managed gitignore files, and added tests, while  Lamine REHAHLIA introduced support for executing commands in a poky-initialized shell. In Yocto, contributions were seen from Yoann CONGAL addressing the fetch2/gitsm and recipetool, Fawzi KHABER and Fabien MAHOT each focusing on oeqa/selftest/devtool, with the latter also making corrections to useradd-example. Over at TI Processor SDK, Romain NAOUR fixed the munmap length for host_linux: dsp. Lastly, in the raygui project, Ludovic JOZEAU rectified the GuiScrollBar dragging behavior.
IoT
We took part in following conferences :
  • Webinar: AWS, IoT et expressLink (FR) 
  • Projet References:  Décathlon (FR)
We've been exhibiting at SIDO Lyon
We've been presenting several demonstrators, one of which will showcase 🧠generative AI, running on an ☁️ AWS environment, to interpret 🩺 medical diagnoses and help the unknowing understand their state of health. The generative AI is based on the model Claudev2 from Anthropic. This AI generative demo was created by Alain Rouen and Murat Goncu.

During the SIDO, we've been taking part in a three-way conference between Smile, AWS, and Implicity. Implicity is one of our customers for whom we have created a box connected to a cloud infrastructure on AWS, enabling the automatic retrieval of health data from patients fitted with pacemakers.
Quality Assurance
We’re pleased to announce the update of TestRail, our test management tool, to newly released version 8.0.1 with a number of new features and improvements:
  • PHP 8.1 compatibility, which provides a number of security and performance improvements.
  • Test parameterization allows you to create test cases that can be run with different sets of parameters, which can help you to increase test coverage in less time.
  • New, customizable charts allow you to analyze data across multiple projects, which can help you to identify trends and make better decisions about your testing process.
  • Ignore test results in charts by Test Status allows you to filter out test results from charts based on their status, which can help you to focus on the data that is most relevant to you.
  • Link Jira issues to test plans and milestones, set Jira issue status when pushing defects, and edit linked Jira issues from TestRail.
  • BDD test case template and feature file import/export.
  • New search functionality and filtering, including cross-project search.
  • Enhanced performance for data-heavy transactions.
  • And a lot of bug fixing
Currently, the version is 7.0.2.1016  but the update is in progress. 
Our TestRail server is available at https://testrail.smile.fr/.
To get access and start working with it, contact Mélanie BEURIOT or Oleh VITIUK.
Data

Platform Data
We're thrilled to announce that the first milestone of Platform Data has been released. The project aim to provide an easy, orchestrated and complete data platform to present use cases to leads. It will also provide reusable production ready deployable components to be used on projects. 

In milestone 1 the platform embeds Metabase, Talend DI, Rundeck, ELK, PostgreSQL and is deployed with Ansible. For more information, you can watch the DataTalk presented in July and the slides.

This platform is starting to be used on projects like Millet.

Ansible Assets
We have released these new Ansible assets:
  • WSO2 APIM 4.2 Role and Generic All-in-one and Distributed Playbook
  • WSO2 IS 6.1Role and Generic Playbook
  • LDAP Synchronization Connector Role and Generic Playbook
DataTalks
  • 23/06/2023 Dévelopement Spark chez Enedis
  • 05/07/2023 Présentation de l’offre Consulting Data
  • 21/07/2023 Eram - Plateforme de médiation dans le cloud - Airflow
  • 28/07/2023 Plateforme Data
  • 08/09/2023 Data Visualisation
And we were involved in conferences: API France, Cloud Est, Matinale Smile Data Lyon, Matinale Data & Digitale Synotis, Breizh Data Day, etc.

⚙️ Tooling updates

We're thrilled to announce that we now provide access to Blackfire, a robust tool designed to simplify the way we manage and optimize the performance of our projects.
Blackfire is a PHP profiling solution that helps you to find performance bottlenecks in our codebase. It creates a detailed visualization of how the scripts are performing, making it easier to detect parts of the code that may be causing slow performance or high resource consumption.

Blackfire offers many benefits for our projects, enabling test-driven performance to prevent future regressions and dramatically improves debugging through detailed visualizations.

To start utilizing these benefits and optimizing your projects, please read this wiki article.
Dependency-Track is a component analysis platform designed to help organizations manage and reduce risks in their software supply chain. At its core, it provides an inventory of all components used on a project, ranging from libraries to Docker images.
For projects, it identifies vulnerabilities in third-party components by integrating with databases like the NVD, OSS Index, and others. Additionally, it enforces license policy compliance, offers an auditing workflow, and detects outdated components. This tool aims to enhance the security and integrity of your projects through informed decisions and timely interventions. It’s also very useful to know which project uses a module so you can better understand how it works.

Currently it’s in beta stage at Smile and the target is to open it to every project before the end of the year.
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