GSoC '13 is over!

Well, Summer of Code 2013 is officially over. My project has pretty much met what was in my proposal - the stats and ranking patch is r+ (though awaiting Florian's approval) and should land soon.

There are a few leftover bugs that I'll be working on when I have time (I've been pretty busy with my coursework lately). Many of them are small (and possibly quick to fix): bugs 2046, 2048, 2069, 2081, 2116, 2076, 2145, 2146, 2184, 2185.

Here's a broad overview of my work over the summer:

• Modified the tabbrowser to accept generic tabs (bug 426).
• As an example usage of the new tabbrowser changes, made it possible to open about:* pages in a tab (bug 2002).
• Wrote the initial new conversation tab, with a list of contacts and a filter box (bug 2015).
• Added support for existing conversations in the new conversation tab and moved the management of possible conversation data to a new ConversationStatsService (bug 2055).
• Wrote an API to request protocol plugins for chat room lists, and implemented it for JS-IRC. Made the stats service use this API to display IRC channels in the new conversation tab (bug 2066).
• Experimented with IndexedDb to store conversation stats. Dropped it in favor of a JSON cache until we migrate to a more sophisticated database from which we can query possible conversations on the fly (and possibly incorporate log indexing?). Wrote code to store these conversation statistics and use them to sort possible conversations. Adapted Florian's log sweeper code to parse JSON logs for stats (bug 2143).

I've learned a lot over the summer. That includes technical stuff - JavaScript, XUL and the Mozilla platform, XPCOM, etc. - as well as a much deeper insight into open source development. I'd contributed to open source before GSoC, but mostly just small patches. This summer I was actively involved in the development process, and got to see how much care and attention is paid to detail when making even small changes. I had to consider things I would've ignored before - localization, accessibility, edge cases, UI profiling, etc. Every UX decision was preceded by lengthy brainstorming and debating sessions on IRC. It wasn't uncommon to spend 10 minutes (sometimes more) figuring out the best name for a variable!

A huge thanks to my mentor Benedikt Pfeifer, and the Instantbird team for all their help over the past three to four months, they've been a pleasure to work with! Be on the lookout for Instantbird 1.5, it's going to be pretty awesome (:P).

PS
You can download a change log of my project from here, or if you have the source, you can generate one yourself using
$hg export `hg log -b default -u nhnt11 | grep changeset | cut -f3 -d ":"`

Progress report: September 6th

This post has been long overdue. Here's the major progress over the last couple weeks:

• Bug 2066 is merged! Awesometab now queries accounts for chat room lists and displays them (only implemented for IRC, you'll have to flip the chat.irc.allowList preference to true in about:config).
• Bug 2143 - Ranking and stats are working and have had a couple of review cycles. We decided that efficient and intelligent searching/filtering is a requirement and also that the log sweeping code could be reused for log indexing. Based on all this the IndexedDB has been dropped from this bug in favor of a simple JSON cache for now.

First thing I'll be doing next is optimizing the chat room code from bug 2066 to eliminate UI lag while receiving chat rooms. After that, the priority will be landing bug 2143. Things will likely get slow after that while I have my first test cycle, but once that's over (or possibly before, if 2143 lands quickly) I'll be looking at optimization and better searching (implement a proper database, indexing, etc).

Cheers!