Community:SummerOfCode15

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This page lists all the Google Summer of Code 2015 projects with confirmed mentors, and which have been approved by the SoC administrator. New suggestions can be made on the Brainstorming page. Do not edit this page yourself; contact Florian for edits.

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 #introduction channel on IRC: irc://irc.mozilla.org/#introduction . Your idea will have a significantly greater chance of being chosen if you can find an existing member of the Mozilla community who is willing to evaluate or mentor it. (You should name that person in your application.)

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

You should do the following:

  • Talk to the mentor. Contact details are on this page; if all you have is a nickname, get on IRC and try and contact them.
  • 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).
  • It is entirely acceptable to apply for 2 or 3 projects, if more than one catches your eye; if the applications are high quality, that can improve your chances. However, more than 3 seems like spam.

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.

Questions about individual projects are best addressed to the potential mentor of that project. These should be listed in the table below. If you want to contact a mentor and contact details are not here, ask people in the #introduction channel on IRC: irc://irc.mozilla.org/#introduction. If you have questions of any other sort, send mail to Florian and Patrick. 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.

Firefox

Title Details Skills Needed Reporter Mentor(s) Comments
Download Integrity Enhance detection of broken downloads in Firefox. Methods may include:The activities include:
  • Implement the front-end in JavaScript to display failed integrity checks
  • Implement and/or use the required back-end features in C++
  • Work with the Mozilla community to discuss and refine the behavior of the feature, including which methods should be implemented first
 C++, JavaScript Paolo

Firefox Developer Tools

Title Details Skills Needed Reporter Mentor(s) Comments
Source Map Library This project would implement missing library support for certain of the source map spec, specifically "indexed" source maps, and experimenting with extensions for encoding the original source code's lexical environment in the source map. JavaScript, Node.js fitzgen fitzgen Easy for a contributor to ramp up on, because it can be done completely in Node.js without needing to build Firefox.

Firefox OS / Boot2Gecko

Title Details Skills Needed Reporter Mentor(s) Comments

Mozilla Platform (Gecko)

Title Details Skills Needed Reporter Mentor(s) Comments

Thunderbird

Title Details Skills Needed Reporter Mentor(s) Comments
Mailbox-to-maildir converter Mailbox and Maildir are two alternative on-disk storage formats for email messages. Thunderbird currently uses Mailbox, but wants to use Maildir. Hence the need for a converter. This is one of the last critical pieces blocking moving away from mbox-style mailboxes. See bug 856087. JavaScript, C++ jcranmer rkent
Alternate protocol for mailnews folders Thunderbird has long-term plans to implement a variety of mail and mail-like protocols to be managed as mailnews folders. An existing addon (SkinkGlue) exists to provide the glue for this. Implement one other protocol, which might be Fastmail's JMAP, or Calendar events & tasks JavaScript rkent rkent and, depending on protocol brong from Fastmail, or Fallen I doubt having 2 twitter implementations in Thunderbird is a valuable investment of time. JMAP seems the most promising protocol idea here; do we know if brong is on board to (co-)mentor this? Even though the code would be primarily written in JS, I suspect having some C++ skills to be able to understand some of mailnews' internals would be very helpful.

Instantbird

Title Details Skills Needed Reporter Mentor(s) Comments
Improve the JavaScript XMPP implementation and implement new features. Includes better error handling, implementing multi-user chats (MUCs), test coverage and adding new/missing features. Feature-parity with libpurple's XMPP implementation is one of the prerequisites for replacing it with the JavaScript implementation and is an end-goal of this project. Students are expected to compile a list of bugs or unimplemented features in the JavaScript XMPP code. JavaScript, XPCOM, an understanding of XMPP is desired Florian Quèze aleth, Patrick Cloke [:clokep]
Implement a new protocol plug-in in JavaScript Instantbird supports protocol plugins implemented in JavaScript. The student will add support for a new protocol in Instantbird. The student working on new protocols should take every opportunity to improve the code and APIs shared by all JavaScript protocol plugins (IRC, XMPP, Yahoo and Twitter). It is expected that the student research the feasibility of interoperability concerns of the protocol during the application period. Students are expected to implement a protocol they use on a day-to-day basis to dog-food the code. JavaScript, XPCOM, maybe js-ctypes, understanding of network protocols Patrick Cloke Patrick Cloke [:clokep] Possible protocols include: Google Hangouts, Facebook, WhatsApp, SIP, Bonjour, OSCAR, TextSecure or Telegram
File transfer support API design, backend implementation, frontend UI for supporting file transfers in Instantbird. XPCOM, JavaScript, webrtc, networking protocols nhnt11 Patrick Cloke [:clokep]

Calendar

Title Details Skills Needed Reporter Mentor(s) Comments
Introducing Calendar Accounts Traditionally our calendar extension is organized into a list of calendars, each calendar being implemented by a “provider”, for example local storage or using the CalDAV protocol. The service to manage these calendars maintains a simple list, the entries have no connection to each other.

Some calendar providers would greatly benefit from being able to group calendars into accounts, for example free-busy lookups are usually per-server operations and not per-calendar. It would also open the door for some great new features that have been postponed because they can be implemented cleaner with the notion of accounts.

XUL, CSS, JavaScript Fallen Fallen Click here for a detailed project description
Resource Booking Improvements The Lightning extension has a dialog for inviting attendees to an event, which also shows availability information. Albeit not very obvious, it also allows booking resources and rooms. To improve this experience we would like users to be able to pick rooms and resources in a way that they don't need to remember the room address and quickly see which rooms and resources exist and are available around the proposed time of the event. XUL, CSS, JavaScript Fallen Fallen Click here for a detailed project description

Bugzilla

Title Details Skills Needed Reporter Mentor(s) Comments
Bugzilla Extension Exchange Format Write an installer script for Bugzilla extensions Perl dylan (dylan@mozilla.com) dylan Spec: http://hardison.net/~dylan/BEEF.html

Accessibility

Title Details Skills Needed Reporter Mentor(s) Comments

Automation & Tools

Title Details Skills Needed Reporter Mentor(s) Comments
Performance Alerts Release Management Toolchain This GSOC project will deliver functionality of detecting alerts as they merge between branches. This is mostly important for regressions, but should also include improvements. We generate thousands of performance alerts every year, and we need a way to look at the high level of what is concerning while having the ability to drill down and understand what small details make up the bigger problems. This depends on us seeing these regression when the code was originally introduced and action being taken to file a bug. In many cases we have preferences that turn features on and off which will have an affect on the alerts that we care about. The target here is a release manager can go to a dashboard, and see the state of the release (most important after uplifting code) and get a list of bugs that are of interest.

This will be integrating a system into TreeHerder to store alerts and allow graphs of the data to be annotated. There will be an API so alert can be generated from other sources and managed by other tools as well.

Python, AngularJS, SQL, Javascript [Joel Maher] [Will Lachance], [Joel Maher] The impact here is the ability for developers and release managers to see the performance impact of their changes while helping us track this.
Retry failures in automation and provide annotations for intermittent failures vs real failures Of the thousands of unitests which are run for each platform and each push we find many intermittent failures. This is a pain point for developers when they test their code on try server. Now that we have TreeHerder, it isn't much work to automatically annotate jobs as intermittent or a regression/failure. In mochitest we have --bisect-chunk which will retry the given test and determine if it is an intermittent or a real regression. The goal here is to do this automatically for all jobs on try server. Jobs will still turn orange. With the outcome of this project failures would need to have a different view in the UI. Python, Javascript [Joel Maher] [Joel Maher] This will build off an existing set of tools while helping us bridge the gap towards a much better review and automated landing of patches system. In the short term, this will aid in developers who see failures and either do multiple pushes, many retriggers, or just ignore them- in summary we will not need to worry as much about wasting resources related to intermittents.
Unittest sanitizer With our thousands of test files, there are hundreds that have dangerous api calls which result in leftover preferences, permissions, and timing issues. A lot of work has been done here, we need to fix tests and expand our work on these resources to all our tests. In addition to cleaning up dangerous test code, we need to understand our tests and how reliable they are. We need to build tools that will allow us to determine how safe and reliable our tests are individually and as part of a suite. Upon completion of this project we should have the majority of tests cleaned up, and a toolchain that can be easily run and generate a report on how stable each test is. Python, Javascript [Joel Maher] [Martijn Wargers], [Joel Maher] The impact this has is helping us cleanup our tests to reduce intermittents and give us tools to write better tests and understand our options for running tests in different configurations.
mozregression GUI Using Python, create a graphical user interface for mozregression (http://mozilla.github.io/mozregression) along with an installer and automatic update system to make it easier for less technical contributors to find and report regression ranges in Firefox and Thunderbird. Python William Lachance William Lachance, Julien Pagès
Convert Mozmill test cases to Marionette he Mozmill framework is being replaced by Marionette to support multi-process Firefox. In the previous Mozmill toolchain we have dozens of libraries and hundreds of tests. This project will entail assessing those tests for uniqueness (compared to browser-chrome) and porting what tests and libraries make sense to Marionette. The goal here is to assess all the tests and have at least 75 converted. Python, Javascript [Joel Maher] [Joel Maher], [Henrik Skupin] Existing tests live here:

http://hg.mozilla.org/qa/mozmill-tests/file/default

new tests live here: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ui-tests

Release Engineering

Title Details Skills Needed Reporter Mentor(s) Comments
Define, test, and publish json hyperschemas for all release engineering APIs We have several APIs (e.g. buildapi, clobberer, (modern) mapper, mozpool, slavealloc, slaveapi, ...) but have no central standardised way of defining them, publishing them, documenting them, or sharing them. A cool project would be to use json hyperschema (see e.g. https://brandur.org/elegant-apis) to define all our apis, and have a framework for auto testing them, auto-documenting them, even potentially auto-generating client libraries for them e.g. in python, and auto-publishing the schemas to a central location for reference. Another interesting option might be using http://swagger.io/.

Example REST apis that we have are:

This GSoC project would involve creating hyperschemas for the above APIs (and potentially others too), finding a good place to publish these references, and look at setting up some tools to generate documentation for these APIs, together with code generation of client libraries, and their associated documentation (godoc, javadoc, …) and if time allows, even auto-generation and deployment of new documentation, libraries, as and when these json hyper schemas get updated (perhaps with travis ci deploying to e.g. github pages or heroku).

json, json hyperschema, solid programming skills, enthusiasm, code generation, web interface design Pete Moore Pete Moore Some good starting points:
Decouple Mozharness internals by breaking it into standalone modules What is Mozharness: It's a configuration-driven script harness that is used for automating > 90% of Mozilla's build and test jobs. It is also used by release engineering services outside of continuous integration.

What needs to decoupled: Mozharness has reached some scaling issues. Jobs that do builds and tests inherit and share exhaustive number of mixins. This leads to a complicated Method Resolution Order and objects with too many attrs that are not even needed.

How can this be done: replace the mixins with standalone classes that act as services. The classes can be instantiated many times and are aware of only their own responsibilities. Once stand alone, you then make them into packages within a mozharness library and installable by pip.

The benefit:

  • better scalability
  • more pythonic so the entry for contribution is less intimidating
  • tools outside of mozharness can avail of subcomponents of mozharness

steps and goals for gsoc:

  • part (1) take mixins like log.py, config.py, buildbot.py, python.py, signing.py, and tooltool.py and convert them from mixins to standalone classes
  • part (2) turn the now standalone classes into python packages


 python, solid programming skills, enthusiasm Jordan Lund, Armen Zambrano Jordan Lund more details:

Rust

Title Details Skills Needed Reporter Mentor(s) Comments
rustfmt Create a code formatting tool that automatically reformats Rust code to meet conventions. Experience with Rust. brson brson, nrc
Rust Code Completion for SublimeText This project would develop a plugin for the Sublime Text editor that provides code completion for the Rust programming language, by integrating with the Rust Racer project. This would require interfacing between Python (for the Plugin) and Rust (for Racer). Rust, Python pnkfelix pnkfelix
Refactoring Rust Create a tool for refactoring Rust code. Experience with Rust. nrc nrc
Tools and macros Develop tools and/or APIs for comprehension and manipulation of macros. For example, extend DXR to work with macros or demonstrate a proof of concept refactoring or formatting tool that works with macros. Experience with Rust, particularly macros. nrc nrc

Servo

Title Details Skills Needed Reporter Mentor(s) Comments
Speculative HTML parsing Servo's HTML parser currently blocks whenever it needs to execute JS code (eg. when <script> tags are encountered in a page). We want to split the HTML parsing code into two threads, one of which can continue parsing the rest of the HTML source speculatively while the other is busy executing JS; once the second is finished, the parser can use the result of the first thread's efforts to improve page load performance. Prior Rust experience valuable. Familiarity with HTML. jdm kmc
HTTP/2 implementation in hyper Hyper, the Rust HTTP library that Servo relies upon, is missing support for exciting new technologies like HTTP/2. This project would design and integrate an HTTP/2 implementation into the client and servo code for hyper. Experience writing code that interacts with network protocols. Prior Rust experience valuable. jdm seanmonstar and reem
Server-Sent Events Servo lacks an implementation of the EventSource Web API. The goal of this project is to implement that API, following the specification as closely as possible and enabling the tests for this feature that already exist. Prior experience with Rust valuable. Comfortable reading and writing JavaScript for the web. jdm jdm
Improve form support Servo currently has rather basic form support, with simple widgets. We lack support for many form controls and functionality like file uploads and form validation. We'd like to add support for most form behavior, based on the specification. Familiarity with web HTML/Javascript. Prior experience with Rust and/or reading web specifications valuable. Manishearth Manishearth (or jdm)

Localization

Title Details Skills Needed Reporter Mentor(s) Comments

Security

Title Details Skills Needed Reporter Mentor(s) Comments

OpenArt

Title Details Skills Needed Reporter Mentor(s) Comments
NoFlo-UI Implement an UI widget on noflo-ui. It could be a timeline (see this issue), plugins for IIP editing or packet display for particular data types. Considering the timeline widget, an initial prototype could be a component library (see noflo-tween). Proposals should include sketches and an implemented prototype (pull requested to noflo-ui). javascript, coffeescript, ux Forresto Forresto NoFlo is a JS dataflow implementation and has runtimes for browser, image processing (imgflo), microcontrollers (microflo), SuperCollider (sndflo) and other targets. Flowhub is the browser-based IDE for the creation of NoFlo graphs.
Tween.JS Port Tween.js to ES6 and make it a modern citizen of the JS world javascript, web animations, graphics Sole Sole Tween.JS is a small engine for declaring and running interpolations between values. It's used in interactive experiences, games and all sorts of projects.
Animated_GIF Refactor and build a version 2, splitting the library into independent reusable modules. Also work on compatibility with Firefox OS. javascript, web animations, graphics, web workers, pixel handling, canvas Sole Sole Animated_GIF is a library for generating Animated GIFs on the browser. It's used in demo apps in mozilla, some properties at webmaker, the wildly successful chat at meatspac.es and who knows where else.
Create image filters using NoFlo It's possible to start prototyping image filters using Flowhub (use Filter Forge's filters as inspiration and our porting of some Instagram filters) and components libraries like noflo-image and noflo-canvas, then port the filters to imgflo. Another option is to create filters directly on imgflo using GEGL. Proposals should include a running NoFlo graph for a non-trivial image filter, together with sketches and original/processed images. Imgflo+GEGL filters are preferred. Pull requests to noflo-image and imgflo are a plus. javascript, coffeescript, noflo, cpp, computer vision basics Vilson Vieira Vilson Vieira NoFlo is a JS dataflow implementation and has runtimes for browser, image processing (imgflo), microcontrollers (microflo), SuperCollider (sndflo) and other targets. Flowhub is the browser-based IDE for the creation of NoFlo graphs. GEGL is a graph-based image processing framework used by imgflo (it's also possible to use noflo-canvas instead of GEGL, but GEGL is preferred due to performance reasons).

Webmaker

Title Details Skills Needed Reporter Mentor(s) Comments
Automated front-end testing Help build automated front-end tests for our Cordova App and investigate different cross-platform continuous integration systems (e.g. sauce labs), with a specific emphasis on Android and Firefox OS. javascript, nodejs k88hudson k88hudson
Community moderation for webmaker.app Help build/improve admin interface, integrate with our services architecture to help choose featured content and support community moderation javascript, nodejs, css, html k88hudson k88hudson

Mozilla Science Lab

Title Details Skills Needed Reporter Mentor(s) Comments
Code as a Research Object Using the proposed crosswalk schema between existing software metadata, create a service (can be a simple website) that will allow users to search and filter software across existing data archives and repositories (Zenodo, figshare, GitHub). Comparing the existing schemas for code storage to help create a metadata standard that allows for discoverability, reuse and citation. json, zenodo api, figshare api, github api Abby Abby "Code as a Research Object" is exploring integrating software into the scholarly workflow. Collaboration with GitHub, figshare and Zenodo.

Background reading: http://www.mozillascience.org/code-as-as-research-object-new-phase/

http://www.mozillascience.org/code-as-a-research-object-metadata-for-software-discovery/

http://www.mozillascience.org/code-as-a-research-object-updates-prototypes-next-steps/

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