GSoC 2013: Android "proxy" client

[Eduard Bolos]

Hi Michael,

First of all, I want to thank you for your feedback.
Regarding my knowledge about C, I hope that I won't have any problems. I
started learning C from high school, and this is my fourth semester at
college doing low level programming (one semester of assembly, two
semesters of "Operating Systems", mostly Linux programming, and now I have
Networking, where we continue programming  in C under Linux). Furthermore,
after taking a glimpse on the "How to", I think that it wouldn't be too
hard to make a plugin for Pidgin to accomplish the desktop part.
Now, about the pairing. I'm familiar to the system used by Firefox for it's
synchronization process, and I've seen it used by other applications too.
For this project to be possible, a server with Ant 1.8 and App Engine for
Java or standard servlet-compliant web server will be needed for the Google
Cloud Messaging part. I guess that the same server could be used for
negotiation between the devices that require pairing, although I'll have to
think a little more about this. Maybe a mentor can help me too.
I'll follow your advice, and I'll play with pidgin a little, build it and
make a simple plugin for it. Then, hopefully, I would be able to appreciate
better what could I do for my GSoC.
I'm not scared, I like to call myself a fearless programmer :)

Regards,
Eduard Bolos


2013/4/12 Michael Zangl <pidgin_m at fam-zangl.de>

> Hi Eduard,
>
> Am 12.04.2013 20:04, schrieb Eduard Bolos:
>
>  My name is Eduard Bolos and I'm a second year undergrad at Babes-Bolyai
>> University of Cluj-Napoca, the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer
>> Science.
>> After looking over the GSoC projects for this year, I decided that it
>> would
>> be interesting to work on a Android "proxy" client for pidgin.
>>
>
> First of all, thanks for your interest in participating. I have
> participated in GSoC for pidgin last year and did the libpurple porting to
> Andorid. This is unrelated to your project, but I have some experience with
> libpurple and Android that I would like to share.
>
>
>  I have learned Android programming almost a year ago, at a workshop, where
>> I have won the first place with my team for the best app created there (a
>> movie collection manager), I have participated at an  Android Hackathon,
>> and I worked at a medium-to-hard difficulty Android project for someone
>> recently that involved synchronization between devices across the cloud.
>>
>
> This is a great starting point for you, especially that you already have
> Android and synchronization skills. For working with Pidgin/Libpurple, you
> should also be able to read (and write) C code.
>
>
>  I have a couple of questions about this project. Firstly, do you have
>> thought on a pairing mode between the mobile and the users's "server" ?
>>
> The pairing would be your choice. You might have a look at Firefox mobile,
> it has a sync-function.
>
>
>  And
>> secondly, the user should be able to respond to the incoming  messages
>> using the mobile application, or he's only able to see incoming messages
>> as
>> notifications?
>>
>
> This is also up to you, depending on how much you think that you can do in
> one summer. I think that the hard part will be getting synchronization to
> work the right way. Then you will probably already have a two-way
> communication, so responding to incomming messages is not that much of a
> problem.
> Some other things you should think about:
> * Do I want to transfer the buddy list
> * What do I do with chats (chat always means group chat in libpurple)
> * Do I need to make changes to libpurple or is it enough to write a plugin.
>
>
>  Also, could you please suggest what I should do in the next days to
>> get better connected to this projects?
>>
>
> From my experience I would advice you to check out and build pidgin. You
> can find the tutorials in the developer wiki [1]. Then you should find out
> which APIs you need and read about them, e.g. [2]. You will probably be
> interested in the signals that are fired when a message is received.
>
> [1] https://developer.pidgin.im/**wiki/UsingPidginMercurial<https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/UsingPidginMercurial>
> [2] https://developer.pidgin.im/**wiki/CHowTo<https://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/CHowTo>
>
> Don't be scared, libpurple is quite big. And don't choose too many
> features for your GSoC. Choose something you believe you can do, and if you
> find time to do some extras then you can do them. But focus on getting the
> important work done.
>
> Michael
>
>
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