Summer of Code 2010 Project Ideas

Here are some project ideas for the XSF's involvement in GSoC 2010. Visit our Summer of Code 2010 page for information about applying.

High-Level Priorities

The high-level priorities for the XMPP community include the following (see also the XSF Roadmap)...

Jingle File Transfer

We are working to migrate from the old file transfer method XEP-0096 to a more robust method based on Jingle. The new Jingle-based method has been implemented in Pidgin but not yet in other clients. We'd love to see more implementations and get more deployment experience with this method so that we can correct and advance the relevant specs, which are:

• XEP-0234: Jingle File Transfer
• XEP-0047: In-Band Bytestreams
• XEP-0065: SOCKS5 Bytestreams
• XEP-0260: Jingle SOCKS5 Bytestreams Transport Method
• XEP-0261: Jingle In-Band Bytestreams Transport Method

Reliability Improvements

The XSF has defined two specifications that make XMPP communication more reliable: Stream Management and Message Receipts. We won't know if these technologies solve the problem until we have more implementation and deployment experience, so we need to get busy coding.

I (MattJ) have some server-side code for XEP-0198 (Stream Management) in Prosody, and am willing (and very interested) to work with someone adding support to a client so we can get a pair of interoperable implementations going this summer.

Mobile Optimizations

As with reliable communication, the XSF is actively working on optimizations for mobile environments. The two most relevant specifications are Roster Versioning and SIFT. Here again we're looking for more implementation and deployment experience.

Stronger Security

Information security is a never-ending, multi-faceted challenge. Some relevant technologies in the XMPP community are:

• CAPTCHA Forms
• Entity Reputation
• Incident Reporting

In addition, we have several competing proposals for end-to-end encryption but they are fairly experimental.

• XTLS
• AES

Specific Client Projects

• Gajim client miss XEP-0234: Jingle File Transfer, and Stream Management, which are high level priorities for GSOC 2010. You can visit Gajim's wiki.

Specific Server Projects

• The Prosody community had a bit of a brainstorming session and came up with some fun project ideas.