This is the talk I gave at Plone Open Garden 2015 at Sorrento (Italy)

1. Activity stream and
conversation engine
(MAX)
Víctor Fernández de Alba (@sneridagh)
Carles Bruguera (@sunbit)
MAX is a project founded by @UPCnet and @BarcelonaTech

3. History
• First commit on August, 2011
• Initially designed as the key feature for the
BarcelonaTech university concept of social
intranet
• The university’s social intranet concept is on the IT
roadmap since 2007 and it has been developed
with limited resources since then

4. Social intranet concept

5. Activity Stream
Activity
Comments
Likes
Favorites
Images
Files

6. Conversations
1to1
Group
Images
Files
Realtime using STOMP RabbitMQ plugin

7. Push notifications
iOS
Android

8. External sources aggregator
Twitter

9. Authentication
oAuth 2.0
Resource Owner Password Credentials flow
(https://pypi.python.org/pypi/osiris)
LDAP
and other pluggable
auth backends

10. Activity stream
• Stores activity from
users and
applications
• The applications
can impersonate
users to feed the
stream with useful
information
oAuth
server
API
MongoDB

11. Context oriented
• Subscriptions are made against contexts
• A context is something with an unique URL
• An user can have n subscriptions to contexts
• The user timeline is composed of all the activity
generated in these contexts

12. Conversations
• Realtime
conversations and
private messaging
• Support for
sending images
and files
oAuth
server
API
(WSGI client)
MongoDB
RabbitMQ
STOMP
Conversation queues

13. Infrastructure
oAuth
server
API
MongoDB RabbitMQ
Queues
push Twitter
conversations
Consumers
Frontends
MAXUI.js
iOS
Android

14. MAX API
88 RESTful
endpoints
> 600 tests and 96% coverage

15. MAX API
Pyramid powered
gevent optimized

16. Backends
MongoDB
RabbitMQ
General storage
Realtime conversation backend
Processing queues

17. Queues and consumers
• Designed for huge loads (conversations specially)
• RabbitMQ queues
• gevent consumers with WSGI API client
• Push (iOS and Android notifications)
• Twitter streaming traking consumers for contexts and
users
• Conversations

18. Frontends
MAXui.js
• jQuery, no framework but
using modern JS
development good
practices
• Can be instantiated
virtually in any web site
given the username and
oAuth token and MAX
server
• Stomp.js (STOMP over
websockets) powered

19. • Native apps
• Stream,
conversations,
subscriptions
• Support for push
notifications
Frontends
iOS & Android

20. Performance
4000 concurrent users
100 messages/sec
200 conversations
20 users/conversation
1 message every 2 seconds

21. Plone integration

22. What’s next?
• Follow people and activity publishing not related to
any particular context
• Sharing
• Improve documentation!!

23. Resources
https://upcnet.github.io/max
https://github.com/UPCnet/max
https://github.com/UPCnet/maxserver