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Project: ejabberd

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Mickaël Rémond edited this page Mar 4, 2015 · 32 revisions
  • Website: http://www.process-one.net/en/ejabberd
  • Responsible: Mickaël Rémond (mremond at process-one)
  • Possible mentors: Mickaël Rémond (experienced mentor, since 2006) Alexey Shchepin, Badlop, Evgenyi Khramtsov, Jérôme Sautret, Christophe Romain
  • If you have any questions, send an e-mail to beam-community AT googlegroups DOT com
  • You can add Mickaël Rémond on XMPP: mremond AT process-one DOT net

ejabberd is one of the most known Erlang project, developed since 2002 by ProcessOne. As a student, you will have the opportunity to work with the ejabberd historical lead developers directly and work on projects that can have a huge impact given the number of worldwide users.

Ahead of the Summer of code, we have prepared a way to automatically setup for ejabberd development environment ejabberd-vagrant-dev

As a student, you can select the language you prefer to contribute to ejabberd, between Erlang and Elixir.

Ideas are listed in no particular order. Students providing their own ideas are also welcome!

Idea #1: XMPP and HTTP convergence

Brief explanation: XMPP is a difficult protocol for web developer. It is a connected stateless protocol. However, it is possible to map a lot of the operation, semantic of XMPP on top of HTTP using traditional ReST semantic.. You could for example browse chat rooms, pubsub nodes, etc using a rest interface. If the session can be separated from the routing of the XMPP protocol, it is even possible to send and receive XMPP stanzas through the HTTP protocol. A lot could be done that way and it would open up a whole new range of use case of ejabberd to traditional web developers or to environnement where using XMPP directly is difficult.

Expected results: ejabberd version that can be controlled either through XMPP or a pure HTTP interface to simplify XMPP usage for web developers.

Knowledge prerequisites: Erlang or a functional language and web development.

Mentor: Mickaël Rémond

Idea #2: Behaviour analysis and metrics

Brief explanation: An XMPP server like ejabberd provide hundreds of relevant metrics to measure and understand its behaviour. For large scale deployments, statistics gathering need to be as lightweight and unintrusive as possible. There is already an emerging UDP protocol for lightweight metrics gathering which is called Statsd. We propose to implement a scalable statsd code base in Erlang and add relevants hook in ejabberd for building a Dashboard service.

Expected results: Erlang based stats daemons link to a scalable database back-end and a Dashboard to represent the gathered informations.

Knowledge prerequisites: Good networking kwnowledge.

Mentor: Mickaël Rémond

Idea #3: Social networking meets chat with Buddycloud protocol

Brief explanation: Buddycloud is an XMPP protocole extension for building federated social networks. To spread usage of that protocol it would be useful to add it to ejabberd server. ejabberd being one of the most used server would make that protocol available for thousands of deployment. More details here:

Expected results: ejabberd implementation that natively support Buddycloud protocol through plugins.

Knowledge prerequisites: Erlang, Elixir or a functional language. Having good knowledge of XMPP protocol is also very important.

Mentor: Alexey Shchepin, Mickaël Rémond

Idea #4: Improve ejabberd configuration and extensibility

Brief explanation: There is plenty of room for improvements in both ejabberd configuration, extensions and plugins writing. The idea would be to built a new configuration DSL for ejabberd that would both allow to configure it and enhance its feature set through hooks. It would make both an easier to understand config file and a more easily extensible server for casual developers. The project will requires to review the existing ejabberd hooks and extend the list to make it suitable for the new DSL. Elixir language would be a good candidate for the Domain Specific Language.

Expected results: Elixir powered ejabberd version.

Knowledge prerequisites: Knowledge of Erlang and possibly ejabberd.

Mentor: Alexey Shchepin, Mickaël Rémond

Idea #5: Multi-User chat module scale and robustness

Brief explanation: Multi-user chat module is clustered in ejabberd but each chat room itself are not redundant. Making it possible to have multiple instance of rooms running on different node could make them more scalable and resilient to the loss of a node.

Expected results: More robust chat room service for ejabberd.

Knowledge prerequisites: Knowledge of Erlang and XMPP. This is a non-trivial effort, but mentors will be able to assist you.

Mentor: Alexey Shchepin, Mickaël Rémond

Idea #6: Web UI administration improvements: Manage ejabberd services, MUC rooms, etc

Brief explanation: ejabberd comes with a web console to manage the server. However, many administration features are only available from XMPP clients from users with admin rights or from ejabberdctl command-line tools. For example, managing chat rooms would be more efficiently performed using a web front-end. To spread the use of ejabberd as an easy to use corporate chat services, it is important to make it more manageable through a web browser.

Expected results: Revamp ejabberd management web interface with extended features

Knowledge prerequisites: Knowledge of Erlang, XMPP and web developments.

Mentor: Alexey Shchepin, Mickaël Rémond

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