GSoC 2008 Application

From PhexWiki

About Your Organization

  1. What is your Organization's Name?

Phex

  2. What is your Organization's Homepage?

http://phex.org

  3. Describe your organization.

Phex is an open source project developing a popular and free Gnutella client since 2001. Phex was one of the first Gnutella clients, and it still takes an active role in pushing the limits of Gnutella, while keeping its CPU load low, so even people with old computers can use it.

Phex also has a history of being utilized in academic studies to test p2p networks, and the current API changes aim to build on that history by making it even easier to utilize the Phex code in new ways.

We believe that the Gnutella protocol is the best (most efficient for users) way to do keyword based searches, so we concentrate on optimizing it for that purpose.

  4. Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2008? What do you hope to gain by participating?

We are a very small team and are looking for more developers that enjoy working on an open source project and bring new ideas into the project.

We want to push the limits of p2p filesharing even faster, and our wiki contains numerous ideas which can further revolutionize the way in which internet users experience data and culture, and we want to realize these ideas along with new ones which go beyond our current imagination.

  5. Did your organization participate in previous GSoC years? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and failures of your student projects. (optional)

No

  6. If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)? (optional)

No

  7. What license does your project use?

GPL-2 or later.

  8. URL for your ideas page

http://www.phex.org/wiki/index.php/GSoC-2008-Ideas

  9. What is the main development mailing list for your organization?

phex-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/phex-developers or Forum: http://www.gnutellaforums.com/development-coding/

 10. Where is the main IRC channel for your organization?

1. phex on freenode.net

 11. Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now. (optional)

http://www.phex.org/wiki/index.php/GSoC-2008_Student-Template

 12. Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please enter their Google Account address. We will email them to confirm, your organization will not become active until they respond. (optional)

• arne_bab ät web.de

About Your Mentors

  1. What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.

We chose longstanding and active members, who know where the project is heading.

  2. Who will your mentors be? Please enter their Google Account address separated by commas. If your organization is accepted we will email each mentor to invite them to take part. (optional)

• gregor?

About The Program

  1. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

We will make sure, that even an unfinished contribution will help the project by working with a clear roadmap with major milestones.

If a student disappears, we can not reach him/her, but we can take steps to minimize the chance that the student disappears in the first place.

For this, the student must report to the community on a weekly base, so he/she directly experiences the feedback.

Also the student must write well commented code, so even unfinished code can be completed by other members. Automatic testing will be done using the tools from Ohloh, backed by manual overview by the existing members of our project.

Features should be merged into trunk as soon as reasonably possible.

And additionally to reports to the community, our mentors will be in contact with them before the student starts coding, during the project and hopefully also thereafter.

  2. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

We have a backup mentor for each mentor. Also we chose contributors who have been active for a long time to minimize the chance of a disappearing mentor.

Also mentors must regularly report to the community, too, so that their work can be carried on easily.

  3. What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?

As for reducing the chance for disappearance, we want them to report to the community on a weekly basis, so they directly experience the feedback and fun free software development brings with it.

  4. What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?

We will include them as full members in our planning, so that they can take an active role in the future of our project, so that they can feel a sense of ownership about the parts they contribute themselves.

Thanks!