Mozilla in Google Summer of Code 2011

GSoC 2011 is here and as always the Mozilla Foundation is a participating project. I really like this year's summer of code logo. The design looks like it's based on the movie TRON.

Mozilla's summer of code projects for this year can be found here:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Community:SummerOfCode11

Seamonkey projects:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Community:SummerOfCode11#SeaMonkey

There are two great projects for Seamonkey and both are for the mailnews component. I wish the very best of luck for the students who apply for this year! I really learned a lot from my summer of code with Seamonkey last year:)

Another interesting news is that one of my friends who encouraged me to take part in summer of code last year is a gsoc mentor for this year! Congratulations Pradeeban!:) Have a great summer of code!:)

Sync services become part of the mozilla platform

With Bug 571902 the weave sync services have now been integrated into the mozilla platform by the weave developer team. The sync code can now be found in the mozilla-central repo under services/. Look forward to seeing Seamonkey include sync as a service in a future release. My GSoC project mentor KaiRo has reported Bug 576970 to get the sync UI ported into Seamonkey (comm-central repo). Although landing sync code in mozilla platform means the application specific code has been separated (mainly ui code) there is still app-specific code in the services/sync which is why I still need my tabs sync patch for Seamonkey to be approved by the Weave team.

Work done last week:

1. Updated my patch for getting tabs sync to work in Seamonkey to include new weave code changes.

2. Started a new mercurial repo to track changes I make to the weave code.
https://bitbucket.org/hariniachala/sm-weave

Learned a lot about mercurial in the process.

3. Changed mailnews extension code to sync both feed and newsgroup mailheaders (status and tags). I am using a svn repo for the mailnews extension.
http://code.google.com/p/weave-mailnews-sync/

Work to be done:

1. Sync mailnews engine by default on application startup.
2. Create a testing plan for testing new mailnews engine in Seamonkey & Thunderbird.
3. Update mercurial repo with mailnews code.
4. Track Bug 576970 and see how sync can be ported into Seamonkey!:)

During this time I discussed with KaiRo on some aspects of the project. It was decided that all weave development for Seamonkey should be tested with Seamonkey trunk code. It was also decided to continue development of mailnews engines as a separate extension.

Adding thunderbird support to mail news extension

Writing the new mailnews engines into a separate extension somehow made it easier for me to keep track of my own code. Of course writing the code directly inside the weave extension was easier but I found keeping track of my code to be a bit messy process. So the plan is to to now continue development in the separate extension and submit the patches to weave once the code is tested and fully functional.

This week I added thunderbird support to the mailnews-sync extension. I used weave-ext.xpi and weaver.xpi made to add weave functionality to thunderbird by Shane Caraveo (aka. mixedpuppy). The xpis can be found on his blog here: http://shane.caraveo.com/2010/05/28/addon-roundup/. I have updated the svn with the tb support code (http://svn2.xp-dev.com/svn/mailnews-sync/trunk/). The extension works on current thunderbird build (3.2a1pre which is ominously named as the 'Shredder').

Next week is going to be busy with final year project presentations and demos but I plan to test and complete the mailnews read status up&down sync within the week. I also need to follow up with the tabs sync patch on bugzilla.

Other news:

Lightning in Seamonkey

I recently tried out the lightning extension in Seamonkey and it seems to me to be the perfect calendar app. I used to be a fan of Google Calendar but I needed to be online and logged into Gmail to view it so I stopped using it after awhile. Lighting seems just super for me. There is another student from the junior batch in my university who is working on Lighting for his GSoC project this year. More details can be found on his blog here: http://meharuban.blogspot.com/

Got my GSoC 2010 package today!

Was very happy to receive my GSoC package today. I am now the proud owner of a Google pen, 2 GSoC 2010 laptop stickers, a GSoC 2010 notepad and my very first visa card! I haven't planned what I will do with the money although I have a general idea of saving up for my masters studies which will either be on business or IT, i still have to decide..

Seamonkey & me..

This week I had a chat with my mentor Robert Kaiser and he gave me some insights into the history of Seamonkey and the way forward for the project. Here is the link to the Seamonkey 2.0 & the Vision beyond article :http://home.kairo.at/blog/2009-02/the_draft_new_seamonkey_vision. I am really interested in having the 'all is a tab' option in Seamonkey and hope to contribute to making that vision a reality soon after my GSoC work:)

Google Summer Of Code 2010!

Wow. I'm selected to Google Summer Of Code 2010! This is my first time applying and since its my final year in university, i thought it would probably be my last chance too! So I was so afraid to check results and see a rejection. I didn't check email until 12.30am (the time of announcement in local time), and I couldn't believe it when i saw the Congratulations email! I checked on the gsoc site as well just to make sure the Google mail program hadn't got it wrong smehw!:D

Then I did a quick chat with my other friends who got selected and thanked my mentor(Robert Kaiser) for selecting me and also thanked Igor Velkov(my assistant mentor of sorts:)). I still have a long list of people to thank though! Everyone who has encouraged me in anyway to enroll for Google Summer Of Code!

GSoC is a big step for me, because I hope to learn all about Opensource programming from it and hopefully it will help me achieve my long term goals and ambitions in life:)

The project I am selected to participate in is a Mozilla project for the Seamonkey internet application suite, which is a browser and email and news all rolled into one. It's just like using Firefox with Email and News built in. And even better the project is an addon and still better its about data synchronization! This is so relevant to my final year project in university that it seems like just the perfect project for me!:)

The project is about implementing tabs and mailnews status sync engines for WeaveSync addon for Seamonkey. I have already started up some work on this and hosted it here (http://svn2.xp-dev.com/svn/smread/trunk/).

So what is a Seamonkey? This is one of the first questions I had when deciding to apply for this project. Seamonkey is a kind of shrimp and it was a code name for the original Mozilla Netscape suite. This later became Seamonkey. There are pics of seamonkeys on wikipedia but I prefer the Seamonkey icon which is quite lovely:)



If you haven't tried Seamonkey yet I suggest you check it out now. You can download it here. http://www.seamonkey-project.org/. It's the perfect solution for keeping track of all the blogs and new sites you follow and keeping track of your email properly:) And with the WeaveSync addon for tabs and mailnews sync coming up soon its gonna get a whole lot better!;)

Thank you to the Seamonkey, Mozilla and Google opensource communities for giving me this wonderful opportunity!