[
Date Prev][
Date Next][
Thread Prev][
Thread Next][
Date Index][
Thread Index]
[
List Home]
|
Re: [ecf-dev] Google Summer Of Code ideas
|
Hi Marek,
Marek Zawirski wrote:
Hello ECF Team!
I'm a student looking for an interesting project for this year Google
Summer of Code. I've thought about ECF project and have've seen some
cool ideas realized during past GSoCes for ECF:)
Yes, indeed. We've been very lucky to have some great
projects...bittorrent provider, sharecode, voip with jingle, real-time
shared editing. And these projects have/are finding being added to ECF.
Few words about me, what you could expect: I'm BSc/MSc undergraduate
of computer science course at Poznan University of Technology
(Poland), quite experienced Java developer with some basic knowledge
about Eclipse internals, frameworks, APIs - I've finished workshop
(Eclipse Summer School) on developing Eclipse plugins some time ago.
My main fields of interests are distributed systems and software
engineering.
That's how I came here actually... This week was my first direct
contact (on-my-screen) with ECF and Mylyn projects - impressing ones!
What interest me most in these 2 projects, and where I found some
common goals, are ideas how to make distributed development process
easier and more fun.
Yes...a worthy goal indeed!
Remy Suen has already done some work on ECF/Mylyn integration...here's a
entry on the mailing list about the work:
http://dev.eclipse.org/mhonarc/lists/ecf-dev/msg01195.html
One possibility is that you take this work and extend it/complete it...I
don't think Remy is actively working on this right now, and I think it's
likely that he would agree to mentor a project using/extending this
code...if you ask really nicely.
I've seen 2 ideas proposed related to ECF on
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Google_Summer_of_Code_2008_Ideas site. I
wonder do you have some other ideas that are waiting for some research
and/or implementation, another developer? I've been investigating how
could I extend this project and I've collected some (more or less)
free thoughs/ideas - I'd appreciate your comments on them:) You know
your project best for sure and may see whether some idea would be
valuable or even possible.
Thoughts, ideas:
// 0) for memory: here should be few ideas that I've found
(un)fortunately already realized in ECF ;)
1) VNC implementation, generally application sharing (also found some
info about it here: http://wiki.eclipse.org/Application_Sharing).
Yes...this would be a terrific project IMHO. The reason we haven't
worked on this so far is captured in a single word: 'resources'. We
just haven't had enough time/interested people to do it.
It would be nice to have VNC remote application/desktop as Eclipse
View, and possibly share this session with other developers - invite
them to such session. I can imagine some use cases of
application-sharing: software support, debugging sessions or
presentations. This is the client side of VNC protocol, application
sharing. Another idea is execution of VNC server from Eclipse - for
whole desktop or for selected window (possibly external application or
Eclipse itsefl). Something more than sharing screenshot of selected
area. This could be intersting feature, IMO.
Yes, I agree...this would be a very interesting/useful set of features.
What about realization?
I've read about proposed idea to create some interface for application
sharing with VNC as one of implementation, or some existing interfaces
may be used (e.g. ISharedObject?). This could be used for session
sharing possibly. VNC protocol need to be implemented or some external
library used.
Yes. There are different approaches here...one would be to make a
localhost socket connection to a running VNC server/host, and basically
have the ECF host get screen sharing data from localhost, send it over
the wire, and then display on remote clients.
Currently, VNC client plugin for Eclipse exists: VNClipse allowing VNC
session to be handled as Eclipse View, but... 1) it seems to be an
inactive project 2) there may be license issues 3) it's
closed-source(?).
Some months ago I tried to contact the VNClipse folks to ask them if
they would be interested in working together...and didn't hear anything
back. They may have been busy, or things may have changed, so it would
probably be worthwhile to try to contact them again. I can't
immediately remember what the license was, but at that time they were
not making the source available.
One other licensing issue is that the VNC source itself (including the
java clients) are GPL, so if we want to use/modify any of that code the
resulting code cannot be under the EPL (Eclipse license). ECF has both
EPL-based components (i.e. those hosted/distributed at dev.eclipse.org),
and those *not* under EPL (the 'ECF Extras' hosted at ecf1.osuosl.org),
so we can work around these issues for a SOC project in any case.
The really problematic matter is running VNC server from Eclipse/SWT.
The best thing would be to have own VNC server implementation in pure
Java. But there is a problem with capturing desktop/application. I've
seen that you can capture screen or part of it from SWT. But can we
register our own GC (graphic context or some another SWT object) for
whole screen, that capture particular area repaint calls, and delegate
these repaints to real GC and VNC server implementation? This would be
ideally, but I'm afraid this maybe impossible from pure SWT as it may
be low-level and system-specific, isn't it? Another solution are
periodical captures of screen/some area, and looking for changes.
However, I imagine that there could be serious performance issues
making latter solution unuseful one. Another problems are mouse and
keyboard capturing of external application window/desktop from SWT. Do
you have some experience related to these issues?
I personally do not, as I'm not an SWT expert. In other java-based
impls of VNC, we've used the native code impls of VNC and talked to them
via a localhost socket connection as you suggest below (booo) :).
There may very well be ways to write a VNC server in java using
SWT...and given SWT's native implementation it could be sufficiently
performant on some/all platforms. I don't know.
But there are several people on the ECF committer list that are very
good WRT SWT and UI: Boris Bokowski, Remy Suen, Chris Anisczyck and
others. Hopefully we can pull them into the conversation
Eventually, VNC server could be called as external system-specific
application (booo) or even there could be no support for executing VNC
server.
Yes.
2) There are some efforts in area of bulletin-board access API and
implementations. Have you though about Atom/GData/RSS implementation?
We already have an RSS implementation...although we have not recently
been using it. It's in
/cvsroot/technology/org.eclipse.ecf/providers/org.eclipse.ecf.provider.rss.
I needs a little work/clean up, but is probably in pretty good shape.
BTW, it implements a so-far-little-used part of the ECF datashare API:
org.eclipse.ecf.datashare.mergeable to implement the Microsoft RSS SSE
protocol (Simple Sharing Extensions).
Also...an ECF committer (Peter Nehrer) has I believe written an Atom
implementation...although I don't know what it's status is.
With the work we are doing on real-time shared editing, it would be
really interesting to do some work on Atom/GData/RSS publishing.
This may open some other ways, like Calendar access implementations:
Goggle Calendar by GData API, some other using transport protocol+ICS
format, XML. I believe that such implementations are related to both
protocols and file-formats: is it in scope of this framework? I've
also seen some efforts for Calendar support in Mylyn project.
That would be really exciting (integration of Google Calendar via GData
API).
3) Do current Discovery API implementations allow finding services in
local subnet? This could be useful feature for creating ad-hoc
environments e.g. on some workshop or meeting.
Yes. We have two providers for the discovery API:
1) Bonjour/zeroconf and
2) SLP (service locator protocol rfc 2608).
Both of these protocols publish/expose services on a local subnet. For
example, see Wayne's blog posting a couple of days ago after
my/Markus'/Jan's talk at EclipseCon:
http://dev.eclipse.org/blogs/wayne/2008/03/20/using-ecf-for-lightweight-distributed-team-collaboration/
Here are the presentation slides for my talk:
http://www.eclipse.org/ecf/presentations/eclipsecon2008/longtalk134/ecf_eclipsecon2008_134.pdf
4) Development of File-hosting sites API with possibility of uploading
files, and sharing URLs (using existing APIs?). Example
implementation: rapidshare.com access.
Yes. It might be good to coordinate this with the Eclipse 'Spaces'
project: http://www.eclipse.org/spaces. We are already working with
them, so this is a natural.
4) SIP implementation, not yet made for ECF(?). I don't have much
experience (except user-side) with that protocol, just wondering how
laborious this task may be...
This is a great question for our two VOIP committers: Moritz Post (did
the Jingle VOIP SOC project last year), and Roland Fru (has worked quite
a lot with SIP and Asterisk).
In either case I think a SIP provider (implementer of the ECF call API)
would be great.
5) Some of your ideas...?
Now that Eclipsecon is over, I will try to post some of my ideas for
ECF-based SOC projects for SOC 2008 on the wiki page:
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Google_Summer_of_Code_2008_Ideas
Please...everyone that can (all committers/contributors, etc) post your
ideas for Google SOC projects on this page!
I also wonder what do you assume in ECF: could you relay on some
external libraries - protocols implementations?
Yes...the protocols do not have to be implemented in java (although this
makes it easier clearly). We have a Skype provider here
http://ecf1.osuosl.org that uses the native Skype client implementation
on whichever platform.
I believe that it may
be not easy to create better API and/or implementation in some cases.
Or is your main goal to create general API, regardless whether
implementations use 3rd parties libraries or not?
Yes...to the latter...our main goal is to create general API, regardless
of whether the providers/impls use 3rd party libs or not.
I think that you (Marek) should post these ideas on the Google SOC ideas
page:
http://wiki.eclipse.org/Google_Summer_of_Code_2008_Ideas
These are great ideas...thanks very much! I'm looking forward to
working with you!
Scott
