Calendar in Summer of Code

The community bonding phase of the Google Summer of Code 2011 is almost over so its about time to introduce our students to you. This year we have accepted two students for two very exciting projects.

Offline Support

The goal of the first project is to provide full offline support. The Student in charge here is Mohit Singh Kanwal. Mohit is a student developer from Singapore who got involved into open source and the Mozilla Calendar Project as part of the Google Summer of Code 2011. A beginner in Mozilla technologies, and code, Mohit hopes to work on the offline synchronization mode for lightning and hopefully by the end of the summer season, you can synchronize online and offline calendars. He blogs about the project here.

Improving the New Calendar Wizard

Another great project this year is improving the new calendar wizard. Lennart Bublies, 21 years old from Hamburg, Germany is working on making life easier for everyone adding a new calendar. Right now you need to enter the exact URL of your calendar. Lennart wants to improve this so you just need to enter the hostname. Read these words from Lennart:

Since summer 2009 I have been studying technical computer science at the University of Applied Science in Wedel. In addition to the university I am working in a small company, called Bit-Serv, in the area of system technology. When I’m not busy with computer science, i like to play guitar, listen to music, meet friends and I spend a lot of time outside.

I heard about Google Summer of Code via the Internet. For a few years I was waiting for an opportunity to work for a company like Mozilla, finally I have found the occasion.

Mozilla is an extraordinary open-source project. The dedication Mozilla has proven towards the community has always fascinated me – I have been using Firefox and Thunderbird for years and I am stoked. As a user of the Lightning extension I have had a few gripes and instead of asking the developers to fix it, I would like to use this opportunity to get involved myself. The project I am proposing has been a pet peeve of mine for some time now, every time I switch machines I need to find out the correct URL of my calendars. Completing this project would make my life easier and I think it would greatly benefit the Mozilla Calendar Project and its community.

Please give a warm welcome to our new contributors, I’m really looking forward to their work. Lets make this a great summer!

5 comments

  1. feaxiaHalfLed

    Awesome Blog. I add this Post to my bookmarks.

  2. Hi: I’m currently working with Lightning and T’bird 3.3a4. Quite a few of my essential plugins work with that version. But with the new version 5.0 nightlies, also called Miramar, most of my plugins, including Lightning don’t work. OK, so my question is, what is the preferred combination of Lightning and Thunderbird to use in the present in anticipation of the next Thunderbird release – assuming that’s known. All the best. John

  3. Philipp Kewisch

    John, I’m working on finding a strategy for all these new builds, there should soon be a compatible build.

  4. Wonderful ! I’m precisely studying the collaborative capacities of Thunderbird for my company, and this would have been of great help as I don’t understand anything about Calendar protocols ;-)
    Cheers.

  5. >
    That’s good. Currently, the array of builds is bewildering. I don’t know which of versions 3.3, 5.0 or 7.0 builds I can confidently use with Lightning with a view to keeping data intergrity. So I’m reluctant to move too much further forward without a clear plan. Thanks. John