Community:SummerOfCode12
This page lists all the Google Summer of Code 2012 projects with confirmed mentors, and which have been approved by the SoC administrator. New suggestions can be made on the Brainstorming page.
Potential students: you may choose from the list below, but you do not have to. Feel free to submit a proposal for your own idea. However, before you do so, see the guidelines for good ideas. You can also discuss your ideas or application in the #developers channel on IRC: irc://irc.mozilla.org/#developers .
In addition to the specifically-named projects below, we have also tagged a number of bugs in Bugzilla with the keyword student-project. However, as the idea of a "student project" is wider than just the Summer of Code, students looking through the list will need to decide whether any particular bug listed there is actually the right size and scope for Summer of Code.
Application Advice
Note that if a project suggests it would be helpful to know XUL (Mozilla's user interface description language), you may be able to get away with learning on the job. Don't be put off from applying if the project otherwise looks right for you.
- Read the GSoC Student Guide and follow its advice.
- Read How Not To Apply For Summer Of Code and avoid doing the things listed there.
- Read our examples of good applications: 1, 2, 3.
- Apply on the GSoC site (note that we have an application template).
Questions of any sort? Send mail to Gerv and/or chofmann. We will try and respond as soon as possible and get your questions directed to the right person. Please allow at least 48 hours for a reply.
Mozilla Platform (Gecko)
| Title | Details - with links as appropriate | Reporter | Mentor(s) | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Networking Dashboard | Build a UI for insight into Mozilla Networking. This is really both a gecko and firefox project. Show what connections are active, how fast connections have run in the past, what protocols are in use with protocol specific context information (http versions, spdy, websockets), allow management (e.g. shutdown) of particular connections, and even trigger some diagnostic tests.
Skills needed: some c++ for core gecko, some js and opportunity for xul to build ui - probably as an add-on initially. |
mcmanus | mcmanus plus hopefully a ux sponsor |
Calendar
| Title | Details - with links as appropriate | Reporter | Mentor(s) | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Improve Invitation support | While Lightning supports invitations, there are still some features that are not supported yet and others that are not quite as stable. Possible goals for this project include improving the UI to make sure users are not confused and implementing/adapting code to support previously unsupported features of invitations like delegations or counters. Lightning relies on the itip/imip standard for invitations, which is also used by most other calendaring clients and servers, so an interested student should look into these. Related bugs are bug 420516, bug 426532, bug 445982, bug 538043, bug 720263, bug 624332, bug 433848. This is not the final list of bugs to be fixed, just to give you an idea of what can be done here.
|
Fallen | ludovic? | |
| OS Integration | Lightning should improve its integration into the Operating system, most importantly on Windows. If you've ever wanted to doubleclick on an event to open it in Lightning, this project is for you. Note this might be a bit more tricky than it intially sounds, but you will have the chance to contribute to multiple projects, as some parts of this project could possibly be better solved within Thunderbird or even the Mozilla Platform. To get prepared, see the list of OS Integration bugs, and especially bug 352566.
|
Fallen | Fallen+someone else? |
Thunderbird
| Title | Details - with links as appropriate | Reporter | Mentor(s) | Comments | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Thunderbird Get Satisfaction support dashboard | Create a real-time Thunderbird support dashboard by implementing i) a REST API to read Thunderbird support data from a MongoDB database (blog post on the code that generates the MongoDB Database) of Thunderbird Get Satisfaction Support topics ii) a JavaScript client that calls the aforementioned API in order to display a real time Thunderbird support dashboard in Firefox - (i.e. port the existing Thunderbird GS Dashboard to the new API)
Level of difficulty:easy to medium Skills needed: JavaScript; Helpful: MongoDB & Information Visualization in the browser using JS and an infoviz toolkit like protovis or D3 |
rtanglao | Roland Tanglao aka rtanglao | ||
| Get ISPDB in production. | There are a few bugs remaining that the Thunderbird team hasn't had time to fix. It would be nice if we could fix them, and finally get the ISPDB up and running and in use. (If this task was too easy, we could also add in support for Thunderbird submitting working configs to the ISPDB.)
Level of difficulty:easy to medium Skills Needed: Python, Some Django experience helpful. |
bwinton | sancus, bwinton | ||
| App tabs for Thunderbird | Firefox introduced the concept of app tabs - smaller, fixed tabs that contain a web app. We might want to do something similar for Thunderbird, as a foundation for things like: the Home tab, a Chat app tab, etc...
Level of difficulty: medium to hard Skills Needed: Javascript, XUL/XBL, CSS |
mconley | sid0, mconley |
SeaMonkey
| Title | Details - with links as appropriate | Reporter | Mentor(s) | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shell Service | The Mozilla Suite only supported a shell service on Windows, and SeaMonkey has inherited that limitation. Both Firefox and Thunderbird support the shell service on other platforms, so it is technically feasible to implement the shell service for SeaMonkey on those platforms too.
Skills needed: C++; some knowledge of GConf/GIO or Cocoa APIs as appropriate. |
Neil | Neil | This proposal requires some knowledge of platform-specific APIs. Only one platform needs to be implemented by any particular student. I can only give limited support for the Mac but it may be possible to find another mentor. |
| Messenger Bookmarks | SM Mailnews provides access not only to mail, but also to NNTP news and even to RSS feeds, and maybe others in future as well. It would be quite useful to be able to bookmark specific news items for later use, e.g. specific postings of a discussion, etc.
This should include full usual bookmark handling for those URLs, including sidebar support. Relevant bugs: Skills needed: JS, XUL; maybe C++. |
Mnyromyr | Mnyromyr | |
| Folder Views | We provide the ability to create and use message views for pre-filtering which messages to show in the thread pane. We don't have a comparable feature yet in the folder pane...
While this would basically mean to port Thunderbird's bug 251296, the UI should be more in sync with the SeaMonkey look and feel, e.g. columns for unread count, size, etc; a drop down menu for switching views; allow custom folder views; ... Skills needed: JS, XUL; maybe C++. |
Mnyromyr | Mnyromyr |
Documentation
| Title | Details - with links as appropriate | Reporter | Mentor(s) | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Create examples for SVG Reference | The SVG Reference needs examples! Lots of examples! We need live samples for all the various SVG elements and attributes, examples for how to do cool stuff with SVG in the DOM, etc. The goal would be to have in-line, live SVG samples, with the code and an explanation of how the code works, for every SVG element and attribute.
Skills needed: SVG, DOM, moderate-to-good English writing skills. |
Sheppy | Sheppy | Also talk to Jeremie Patonnier about helping with mentoring. |
| Create examples for HTML and CSS references | The HTML and CSS references on MDN need examples. While there are some here and there, someone needs to go through and ensure that every HTML element has good examples that cover a variety of use cases and interesting capabilities, and that every CSS property has good coverage as well. These would include live examples with the code and an explanation of how it works.
Skills needed: HTML and CSS. Moderate-to-good English writing skills. |
Sheppy | Teoli | |
| Add jsFiddle integration to Kuma | The new Kuma wiki for MDN needs to have good integration with jsFiddle for easily creating examples then editing, experimenting with, and embedding them into documentation. Should be able to view the source and live output, then experiment with the code in real time (either in place or, perhaps preferably, in a new window).
Skills needed: JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Python. Django framework familiarity a big plus. |
Sheppy | Sheppy,Luke Crouch |
Developer Tools
| Title | Details - with links as appropriate | Reporter | Mentor(s) | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Highlight JS that causes reflows to occur | Gecko developers are able to point out statements that trigger reflows from code inspection. We can do better: bug 453650 discusses adding notifications for timing reflows and calls that trigger a reflow. With this information, we can create a tool that obtains stack traces when reflows are triggered, and order the results by duration, and link this to specific triggering JS statements. | jdm | Someone from devtools, with platform support | C++ and JS required. |
| Highlight slow CSS selectors | We have a wiki pages of ways to write CSS rules that take advantage of Firefox's internals: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Writing_Efficient_CSS. If we could add timing data to CSS selector matching, we could use that information to profile rules on a page and display a profiling view that links to specific problematic rules. | jdm | Someone from devtools, with platform support. | C++ and JS required. |
Foundation
| Title | Details - with links as appropriate | Reporter | Mentor(s) | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Slide Drive Improvements | Slide Drive (https://github.com/dseif/slide-drive) combines the deck.js HTML5 slideshow package with Popcorn.js. It was originally developed for Software Carpentry, but would be useful to many other people who want to move off PowerPoint and recorded video. Many enhancements are possible, the most important being accessibility support. | greg | greg |
Release Engineering
| Title | Details - with links as appropriate | Reporter | Mentor(s) | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tryserver automation improvements | We currently have a trychooser syntax which allows developers to customize what they'd like to test their patch with (out of over 200 build & test options) - this syntax can use some improvements to allow for even more granular control and also needs a web-driven interface as well as logic that would let users specify a repo (mozilla-hosted), a custom test package, and much more. Bugs include try_enhancement tracking and most importantly bug 625463 | Lukas Blakk | Lukas Blakk | useful skills include some webdev and python programming |
Instantbird
| Title | Details - with links as appropriate | Reporter | Mentor(s) | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Account import wizard | Goal: Ease the pain of switching to Instantbird
Lots of users don't try a new IM client only because they don't want to spend time reconfiguring all their IM accounts. Being able to import accounts from other clients installed on the system would help Instantbird adoption. The student should focus on the dominant IM clients (Windows Live Messenger, AIM, ...) and on the other multi network IM clients (Digsby, Pidgin, Trillian, Miranda, ...). The student will need to study the way other IM clients store their profile data (reverse engineering may be required), think of an architecture to share as much code as possible between the various import modules, and implement import modules for some clients Skills needed: JavaScript XPCOM, XUL, maybe some reverse engineering. |
Florian Quèze | Florian Quèze | |
| Protocol aware error console | Goal: Create a tool letting developers (and users) see what was exchanged for each account at the protocol level.
A student working on this project will either extend the existing Error Console or create a new console from which it will be possible to see what data has been exchanged for each account. Example of desirable features: copying a log of whatever happened with an account from the beginning of the connection attempt; syntax highlighting of the exchanged data (requires some parsing of the data exchanged by protocols like XMPP, IRC, Twitter (JSON)); letting the user type and send a raw message to the server. Skills needed: JavaScript, XUL/XBL, some basic understanding of XMPP, IRC and Twitter protocols. |
Florian Quèze | Florian Quèze | |
| Voice and Video | Goal: Support voice and video communication.
This project intends to explore the possibilities for Voice and Video communication using the Mozilla platform. The student will need to experiment both with usage of the microphone and webcam and with codecs available in the system on the three supported OSes. Compatible implementations of the various IM protocols that support these features is out of the scope of this project, but the student will at least need to prove that s/he has seriously investigated using the various open source projects that have started some work on this. A (mostly) working proof of concept is expected. UI mockups for what a well-thought user interface for voice and video could be would be appreciated. Skills needed: JavaScript, XUL, XPCOM, maybe C++. |
Florian Quèze | Florian Quèze |
Emscripten
| Title | Details - with links as appropriate | Reporter | Mentor(s) | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Port the open source C/C++ project of your choice to the web | Emscripten lets us compile C++ to JavaScript. Porting a project involves building it with Emscripten and fixing any problems along the way (changes to makefiles, implementing missing library support in Emscripten) as well as analyzing the generated code and seeing how to optimize the code for the web. Any interesting open source C or C++ codebase would be a good project to work on here, some examples: GTK, Qt, SuperTux, PyPy, etc.
|
Alon Zakai | Alon Zakai |