Me, myself and my GSoC project

Hello, all.

I've finally aggregated my blog on the planet, and in this first post I'll talk a little about myself and my GSoC project for KDE. :)

Well, my name is Paulo, I'm brazilian and recently got my bachelor's degree on Computer Science. Now I'm a masters student at Federal University of Campina Grande, here in Brazil. I'm part of the Embedded Lab, where for years is made a lot of researching about pervasive computing and embedded systems, with publications all around and partnerships with big companies like the Nokia Institute of Technology (INdT) and Petrobras. In a later post I can talk about my current work on the masters course.

I begun to use Linux at the university, which gets the students involved with FOSS since the beginning of the Computer Science course. After my first glance on KDE (about 4 years ago or more) I've became an user and fan. Unfortunately I've woken up late for contribute to KDE, but before later than ever, right? ;)

So, back in 2009 I begun to study about the UPnP standard, since the Lab where I work has a quite active branch of research about UPnP (including the development of a framework widely used at Maemo community, called BRisa). Hence, in the last edition of GSoC I've applied for KDE, in a project proposed by Bart Cerneels which aimed to give UPnP support on Amarok. For my sadness at the time, the project was not accepted, but here I am now (yay!) and my project is quite related to that one: this year my intent is to work on the Solid backend (and frontend as well) for UPnP, and through it many KDE applications will have a transparent access to UPnP resources available on the network (MediaServers, MediaRenderers, InternetGateways, etc.). My mentor for the project is Kevin Ottens, from the Solid team (who is a very cool guy, by the way :).

The project will consist of two phases. In the first one the goal is to get the Solid backend working and stable, as well the wrapping side (frontend). For this first phase, the work of Friedrich Kossebau on the KUPnP backend will be taken as basis, and the tendency is that the UPnP library used will be the HUPnP stack, developed by Tuomo Penttinen. I'm not sure if the use of Cagibi, another UPnP framework developed by Friedrich, is intended too.

The second phase will consist of some integrations with the KDE SC, with the development of a plasmoid which will show some informations about neighbor UPnP devices and the improvement of Plasma device notifier to detect and show these devices, too. After that, a data-gathering application for debug purposes will be made, aiming to get all the information about the local UPnP environment and let developers aware of error situations that can happen with the integration. For this application, the Python version of BRisa framework will probably be used.

All of what I've said before is on my proposal (with the timeline for all activities), which can be seen here.

In this first week of community bonding period I've got my SVN account and now I'm setting up my development environment. I'm not sure about the necessary KDE modules, but I've checked out kdelibs, kdebase, kdenetwork and kdesupport. Any hints in that matter are welcome. By the way, I'm waiting for the first release of KDevelop4. ;)

Well, this is enough for now. I hope we can all enjoy this time working together and for now on I want to be more and more an active part of this crew.

Cheers.