Google Summer of Code 2015 Projects

The one thing I like best about the Google Summer of Code is that it gives us an opportunity work on cool new features I never have time for on my own. Also, its a great opportunity for students to learn about working on a large-scale project and prepare for real life work, which is very much different than the smaller projects I remember from my university. Students that have stayed with us even after the Summer of Code have proven themselves invaluable, showing spirit and enthusiasm for an open source project like the Mozilla Calendar Project gives me a warm feeling in my heart.

This year, we have proposed two projects: Introducing Calendar Accounts and Resource Booking Improvements. As the projects have been available on the wiki for a while (sorry for not blogging about this earlier!), we’ve already had the one or other student interested in applying. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t any room left for a fine candidate like you!

In the first project, Introducing Calendar Accounts, the goal is to improve our backend layer to move from a flat list of calendars to a hierarchical list with calendars grouped by the accounts they belong to. Aside from the benefits this gives us w.r.t. avoiding code duplication and ugly hacks, it will open Lightning to a load of new features related to accounts, for example notifications if a new calendars was added to the account or improved support for authenticating to calendars on one server with different credentials.

Second, we have proposed a project on Resource Booking Improvements. Right now, our invite attendees dialog is fairly simple and only allows entering email addresses and seeing their free/busy status. What is missing is an easy way to invite resources and rooms, for example when you want to book a conference room for your meeting. There is an inconspicuous feature that allows changing an attendee to a resource entry, although there is no real value in doing this aside from sending more correct data to the calendar server. The user still has to remember the virtual email address associate with the conference room. With this Summer of Code project we want to allow any kind of calendar provider to be able to specify how to search for rooms and resources. Certain CalDAV servers support searching for these entries using custom queries, the goal for this project is mostly to support those servers.

If you are interested, please do get in touch with me, either via email or on irc.mozilla.org, where my nickname is Fallen and I usually hang around in #calendar. Should I not be around, redDragon (a former GSoC Student, by the way!) will be there to help you.

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