GSoC ends… but my work will continue
Today is almost the last day before the Google Summer of Code hard “pencils down” date (August 20). It was a really great experience to work with the great buddycloud team on creating an HTTP API for them this summer, and I learned a lot about XMPP, HTTP, node.js and several other things in the process. I especially would like to thank my mentor Simon Tennant, who helped me a lot to get started and was always there when I needed him. Thank you!
So I guess now is the right time to look back and see what I have accomplished in the last 13 weeks. Thankfully, I managed to implement most of the things I wanted to. buddycloud now has an HTTP API that lets its users receive channel feeds, post to a channel, find out who is subscribed to a channel, receive channel metadata, et cetera. Rodrigo Duarte, who was working on a buddycloud media server at the same time, and I even found the time to integrate our servers so that HTTP API clients have access to media without needing an XMPP connection – something that neither of us has planned for before the program started. In short, I think I can be happy with what I have done.
However, there is one feature that didn’t make it – listening for new channel posts in real time. As I have mentioned in my last post, this depends on some functionality in the buddycloud server that is not fully implemented yet. Unfortunately I didn’t find the time to continue working on this as I was on a two-week vacation to the US for the last two weeks, but I hope I can finally get around to finish this up soon after GSoC.
In general, I do not plan to move away from my project once Summer of Code has ended. The buddycloud team is awesome to work with, and the last thing that I want is my code to bitrot and vanish into uselessness. I will continue to maintain and extend the code as long as possible and might help out the buddycloud project in other areas in the future.
Before I end this post, I want to say THANK YOU to the XMPP Foundation for choosing and supporting me for this Summer of Code (especially for sending us copies of XMPP: The Definitive Guide and Getting Things Done – they helped me a lot!), and to Google, without whose sponsoring all of this wouldn’t be possible. You rock!
