[GSOC 2013] Easy plugins with a website

[Bhaskar Kandiyal]

Hi,

Apologies for the late reply, just finished my exams today so now I'll
have much more time to discuss the project :)

After a lot of head-banging I got Zamboni to work (partially) and now
I've come to the conclusion that Zamboni is not a good choice. It's very
complex for our use case and a pain to set up and get working. Using it
would be overkill for our simple project. So, in my opinion we're better
off using our own implementation as it can give us more flexibility.

As for maintenance, I don't mind maintaining it and I'll be using
Mozilla's playdoh (with maybe some Zamboni modules) which would provided
added security and optimizations to our website and we'll have a little
bit less code to maintain. That's why I've decided on using Django. A
demo website is in the works.

For the UI, I've quickly hacked together a plugins window (standalone
right now and very very basic). So it would give a better idea than the
mockups as to how it would look. I'm posting a screenshot [1] for the
'Get New Plugins' tab which opens up the mobile site of
http://addons.mozilla.org/ in a WebKitGTK+ WebView using iPhone's user
agent. I'll post the code later when I'll upload it somehwere like github.

PS: Tomorrow student applications open for GSOC. So, I would like to ask
if I have to get my proposal approved by a mentor first before
submitting? Also, would it be acceptable if I take a couple of days to
submit my proposal as I'm still working on the details. Do let me know
if anyone's interested in reviewing my proposal before I submit :)

[1] -
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B-owBEoEQANeOFN3MkNiRlNNX1k/edit?usp=sharing

Cheers,
Bhaskar Kandiyal