Google Summer of Code is a global program focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development. Students work with an open-source organization on a 3-month programming project during their break from school.
The actual timeline of GSoC is available here. The main coding period spans between 27 May and 19 August and is divided into 3 parts each one following an evaluation.
NpChat is a photo and file-sharing application built on Android and is inspired by Snapchat. It runs over the Named Data Network (NDN) and focuses on decentralised information sharing architecture. It stands as one of the best examples of Android application developed on the new Internet architecture.
The project description can be found here. The project aims to improve the functionalities of the erstwhile NpChat application. During the GSoC period, I intend to develop this application from a working prototype to a finished application, with its first version released on the Google Play Store.
The summary of the work done until now in the form of pull requests is mentioned below:
The list of all my current PRs are available here & here. Major ones of them are mentioned below:
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[IMPROVEMENT] Replaces FaceProxy with Memorycache : ISSUE : Replaced
FaceProxy(which used to store and serve data for interests) class withMemorycacheclass which usesMemoryContentCache(from thejNDNlibrary). -
Aimd pipelining in Segment fetcher: Updated
SegmentFetcher.javafrom thejNDNlibrary to useAIMDpipe-lining in place of thefixedwindow fetching. Ran some tests onminindnto compare these strategies among thejNDNandndn-cxxlibraries, the most recent of the results can be found here. After a long review period and a list of changes, it was successfully merged. -
Replace Log with Timber: Replaced the log statements in NpChat with better Logging library, Timber.
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Add AboutActivity: Added a simple About Screen in the NpChat app to provide relevant information to the users.
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Introduce MVVM architecture : ISSUE: The state of the code at that point was more or less ad-hoc with things like memory and network access specific code placed and used in the view itself against the encouraged application architecture patterns like MVVM. This Pull Request moved and reorganised the code to single Activity multiple Fragment MVVM architecture, with operation logics separated and organised into classes and packages.
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Add location co-ordinates to pictures : ISSUE: Added a feature to let user geo-tag a picture. Once Geo-tagged, the location is shared by adding the co-ordinates into the
Exifmetadata and transformed to ground address usingGeocoderclass. -
File sharing: Improved the pictures sharing and file browsing experience.
Current work: Working to update and use Android Identity Manager to get signed certificates of the namespace using NDNCERT.
The experience so far has been good and learning. I started from a noob in Networking. Now I have some experience and knowledge of the working of networks, routing, etc. I have also gained interest in NDN as a concept as well.
Getting my way through the issues and errors were challenging and at times frustrating. The issues themselves had different scopes and problems. There were issues like MVVM, which had much to do, and a lot of bugs involved and was generally related to UI whereas issues like AIMD had much on the learning side and a constant gradual development spanning more than a month. With these issues solved, I also faced new bugs on the work done, some silly, while others quite difficult to trace and regenerate.
I also had days completely devoted to GSoC but on the other hand, a couple of days when I had other priorities to be done. On and all the work progressed from issue to issue, from logic to logic, across different libraries and utilities. The work on minindn was quiet cool and amazing. Initially quite confusing, it turned out to be fun and learning experiences. Also, visualising network state in minindn and physical nodes was also interesting.
As a part of the project, I faced some challenges, which gave me experiences in some new fields
- Moving to decentralised from the popular centralised server model.
- The nature of the work (pretty much new and unprecedented).
- Establishing and updating development environments and NDN dependencies.
- Debugging through minute but challenging bugs.
Mentors were very helpful and supportive. Throughout the journey, they helped me with every single doubt and error. Also, on advice, I joined and the mailing list and also added a mail for AIMD pipelining as well. I also raised issues and pull requests on Github and Redmine.
- Though the documentation is quite good, considerable improvements like adding examples can be made.
- Supporting tools in various libraries are cool and helpful but there is scope for little improvement as well.
- Also, libraries and dependencies created problems while installing and updating them.
