2025-11-07 –, Room 145
Have you ever wanted to contribute to Nextcloud or develop a Nextcloud app, but do not necessarily have any experience with PHP? In this talk, we will share some recent developments that have been happening around Nextcloud in order to make the Nextcloud ecosystem more welcoming and accessible to developers of all skill levels and programming languages. In particular, we will introduce the new AppAPI framework, which enables the ability to produce "external apps" that can be written in any programming language (yes, really!), as well as provide some examples of such apps being used in production today. As one of the leading FLOSS alternatives to many of big tech's product offerings, Nextcloud needs you now more than ever!
This 50-minute talk will include a brief introduction to AppAPI and how it works, explain what "external apps" are and how they differ from traditional Nextcloud apps, as well as show some example external apps in action and their real-world use cases. We will also highlight other ways the community can contribute to the Nextcloud ecosystem as a whole through: 1) the various programming languages already in use throughout the suite of Nextcloud software, and 2) how other (under-represented) languages can be newly integrated into the app ecosystem.
Afterwards, we will move into the live workshop component where we will walk through the development of a simple example app in Python. With this hands-on tutorial, our goal is to lower the entry barrier for all developers by showcasing what it is actually like to develop for Nextcloud, ultimately making it accessible to students and entry-level developers.
Dr. Edward Ly is a Portland, Oregon native who now works as a software engineer at Nextcloud, where he is part of a team that develops ethical AI solutions and supports the greater Nextcloud and free software community. Previously, he obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Aizu, with the resulting research also being released as free software. He has also successfully given public talks at various academic research conferences (AES, EvoStar) and open source events (FOSSY, Nextcloud Community Conference), all while being openly autistic.
In his spare time, Edward enjoys playing free software games.