ASAP - A Simple Applications Portal

By AdNovea – Nov 2010 – version 0.1.0

Visit the QNAP forum for technical discussions and ASAP Store utility download.

A.S.A.P. - A Simple Applications Portal is intended to provide an Applications Store for Linux devices with or without display capabilities. With the explosions of mobile devices and the need for numerous applications addressing a wide diversity of users expectations, the former application installers have migrating toward online stores such as the Apple Store or the Android Market to name to most populars today. Whereas the stores above runs on devices with display capabilities and provide small size applications (few hundreds of KB) running on virtual machines (JVM), there was also a need to improve applications installers and give the end-user a similar look & feel. The challenge lies in the difficulty to manage the remote interface to handle device without display capability. From a user standpoint, the installation of applications through the ASAP Store is pretty much the same as the installation on smartphones but the size of applications involved is much bigger (several tenth of MB) and the installation time may be a little bit longer.   WARNING: ASAP is currently under field testing. DO NOT USE on PRODUCTION SERVERS! IMPORTANT: ASAP applications are packaged to be compatible with IPKG/OPKG modules. It uses the Debian package structure to carry data. Therefore, in addition to the applications provides from our ASAP repository, you will be able to manage through ASAP web interface, the installation of the thousand libraries and applications provided by the Optware/IPKG repositories. Therefore, ASAP is also an IPKG front-end.

REQUIREMENTS

Installation packages are currently available for recent QNAP devices:

Series	Processors	Devices
TS-x09 series	Intel	TS-509 TS-809 TS-809U - TS-109 TS 209 TS-409 are no supported
TS-x10 series	ARM	TS-110 TS-210 TS-410
TS-x19 series	ARM	TS-119 TS-219 TS-219P TS-419P TS-419U
TS-xxx series	PowerPC	---
TS-x39 series	Intel	TS-239 TS-439 TS-509 TS-639 TS-809 TS-809U SS-439 SS-839
TS-x59 series	Intel	TS-259 TS-459 TS-559 TS-639 TS-659 TS-859
TS-x69 series	Intel	TS-469 TS-569 TS-669
TS-x79 series	Intel	TS-879 TS-1079 TS-1279 - Not checked
NMP series	MIPS	NMP-1000P - NMP-1000 is no supported

APPLICATIONS

A couple of applications have been made available to start with the field tests.
WARNING: Applications have not yet been fully tested.

	APPLICATIONS	INTEL x39&x59	ARM x10&x19	PPC	MIPS NMP
Ajaxplorer	AjaXplorer is a file explorer for remotely managing files on a web server or operation as a simple file-sharing system. Its rich layout and actions make it easily accessible to virtually any end-user.	X	X	X	X
Applanix	Applanix is a rental property management system for small/medium scale accomodation establishments.	X	X	X	X
	A.S.A.P. Store is the utility software to install on the Linux device to provide a web user interface to add, configure and manage new Applications.	X	X	X	X
	A.S.A.P. Menu provides a user interface to easily access all Applications installed on your device.	X	X	X	X
Drupal	Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications.	X	X	X	X
eyeOS	eyeOS is a web desktop that seeks to enable collaboration and communication among users.	X	X	X	X*
freeSWITCH	FreeSWITCH is communications platform software for the creation of voice and chat driven products.	X
GLPI	GLPI, stands for Gestionnaire libre de parc informatique (Free Management of Computer Equipment), is a free trouble ticket system that anyone can use to build up a database with an inventory for computer equipment (computers, software, printers, etc.).	X	X	X	X
ASAP Hello	Hello is a sample for the A.S.A.P. System based on the OPKG modules.	X	X	X	X
IceScrum	IceSCRUM: Agility has become mainstream, and Scrum has become the most popular agile method. IceScrum was designed to help teams to use Scrum. IceScrum requires the Java Tomcat server and the JRE (Java Runtime Engine).	X
Joomla	Joomla! is a free, open source content management system for publishing content on the Internet and intranet with features such as caching, RSS feeds, printable pages, news, blogs, polls, website searching, and languages.	X	X	X	X
Locales	The LOCALES settings are about formatting output given a localization but the timezone information and daylight saving time are not usually part of it.	X	X	X
Mono	Mono is an open source .NET development framework.	X
MediaWiki	MediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application.	X	X	X	X
OpenNMP+	OpenNMP lets you take the best of your Network Media Player.				X
phpMyAdmin 3	phpMyAdmin v3 is a tool written in PHP intended to handle the administration of MySQL. Currently it can create and drop databases, create/drop/alter tables, delete/edit/add fields, execute any SQL statement, and manage keys on fields.	X	X	X
phpMyAdmin	phpMyAdmin 2.11.11 is a tool written in PHP to handle the administration of MySQL. Currently it can create and drop databases, create/drop/alter tables, delete/edit/add fields, execute any SQL statement, and manage keys on fields.				X
PlugMedi@	PlugMedi@, manage your multimedia libraries.	X	X	X	X
PostGreSQL	PostGreSQL Administration provides a web interface to manage PostGreSQL databases.	X	X	X	X
Q-Sims	Q-Sims is based on OpenSim a 3D Application engine to create virtual environments or worlds.	X
SPIP	SPIP is an Internet Content Management System.	X	X	X	X
SugarCRM	SugarCRM is an open-source software-solution vendor which produces the Sugar Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.	X	X	X	X
Tomcat	Apache Tomcat is an open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies. It requires the Java Runtime Engine.	X
Webmin	webERP is an open source ERP system for Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME).	X	X	X	X
vtiger CRM	vtiger CRM is an open source CRM application that was forked from SugarCRM with the intention of being a fully open source CRM application with comparable functionality to SugarCRM and Salesforce.com.	X	X	X	X
Webmin	Webmin is a web-based system configuration tool for Unix-like systems.	X
WordPress	WordPress is a personal publishing system that allows you to create a blog, or web log, on your site. It offers intuitive administrative tools and sophisticated design features that make it easy to develop and integrate a personal or professional blog.	X	X	X	X

[*] Performances can be reduced due to CPU resources and USB thumbdrive performances.

New applications will be added to the online store in the future. Visit the [forum] or the [Store]

A.S.A.P. Eco-System

The A.S.A.P. System is based on the OPKG package management system for handheld devices - a fork still maintained of the former IPKG System.
The ASAP System involves the ASAP Store - an utility running on the user device gets application from the online store - and the ASAP Forge - a set of tools for developers to package applications and for administrators to manage the store.

Today, all applications are free but donations to developers are encouraged.

NOTE: For security reason, by default the ASAP Store runs in walled garden mode and prevents access to any remote repositories but the ASAP and Optware ones.

ASAP packages

ASAP packages keep the same structure as the IPKG packages also shared with the debian packages.
There are some additional data to enable the display in the ASAP store.

To build ipkg packages you may refer to:

http://buffalo.nas-central.org/wiki/Construct_ipkg_packages_%28for_developers%29
http://www.oesf.org/index.php?title=IPKG_Howto

License

As of today, only the ASAP Store utility software running on NAS and NMP is released under the GPL license for non-commercial uses only.

IPKG - OPKG - ASAP Systems Comparison

IPKG / OPKG / A.S.A.P. Systems comparison