Kamaelia & Google's Summer of Code

This information is historic.

See our main Summer of Code page to find out how it all went.

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If you're a student enrolled in a higher education course that matches Google's definition of who's eligible, and you've been thinking "I keep meaning to try Kamaelia, but don't have a project", this is an opportunity. You'll be paid by Google for your time, your work will live on as components which are always useful and if you achieve the project goals, you'll produce something cool and useful, and our undying gratitude :-)

Note:You're not likely to be working onsite with us ! (You might be 1/2 way round the world :) )

Who are we looking for?

We're looking for enthusiastic people to work on specific projects, which are listed on our new projects pages (see below). You don't necessarily need lots of experience, indeed we've found a naivete can actually help since you have less preconceptions about how code should be written (And often more open to the component approach).

AGAIN, please note: For summer of code, we're interested in anyone who can code, not just PhD candidates :) We're rating applications based on enthusiasm, approach and project they want to do as much as we are on people's innate ability. Anyone with sufficient talent OR determination can produce something wonderful.

(The reason for this note is someone made the comment that they thought we're interested only in PhD candidates which is unfortunate. Whilst Dirac is pretty hardcore, Kamaelia is written in python for a very specific reason - to lower the barrier to entry)

Project Ideas...

All the following ideas are linked to on the main project ideas page, which is also a discussion forum if you have any questions or want greater depth. There is a vague prioritisation but not absolute prioritisation of this list.

• Trusted Communications
• Component bindings to AV codecs
• Modifications of Visual Graphline editors, Reapplication to Graphline Video Editting
• CSS-esque Styling and XML (?) Layout Definition of Pygame Applications
• Collaborative Sketching Server - A P2P Events Backplane Application
• Creation of an integrated bit torrent component
• OpenGL widget framework
• Hierarchical topology visualiser
• Hierarchical Introspector
• Distributed physics
• Primitives - Components for codeless composition

Please follow up on the project's idea page if you're interested in the project, or on the mailing list.

Want to do your own project idea? Cool...

... run it by us, let's see if there's a fit with the project's needs! The rest of this section will help you with the latter...

If the projects we've listed don't inspire you, or make you go "ooooooh", or "aahhhh", please bear in mind this: We're a media organisation, we want to provide the most fun experiences our audience can have, as widely as we can. That opens up a huge scope for projects, and we (those of us working on Kamaelia obviously :) at BBC Research would like to make it such that Kamaelia can provide the toolset to simplify that process.

Also bear in mind the list is never going to be exhaustive as a result!

Surprise us with something you want to do, that blindsides us and really helps our goals. If it helps with the specific challenges we use to guide our work at present, so much the better. Anything related to DVB-T (freeview), video transcoding, or aggregation/distribution systems relating to RSS and/or Atom will also get our attention. (You really need to look here if you're coming up with your own projects :-)

In the past we've had a pre-university trainee work on previewing PVR content on a mobile phone using Kamaelia as a proof of concept, and a second year student provide tools and a toolset for a simple reliable multicast protocol & multicast island joining. What would you like to do? It could be as simple as helping with packaging of certain applications we'd like to see packaged up (eg as executables for windows & Mac OS X), or as complex as an audio/video conferencing tool.

Please look at the project list first though. Also our current focus of work is described here, and anything that relates to that will really get our attention.

One note:we would prefer ideas to be posted to main project ideas page where possible. It won't show up immediately, and if you mark it as "please don't make visible", we won't - and it won't be visible

Some links & Getting Started...

If you've looked in the past and been looking for help with installation, we've recently changed over to using a bundled distribution, which now has accompanying installation notes (We'll expect you to use the latest CVS tree though, generally speaking). As a result some links that might be of use:

Useful links you'll want:

• Single page introduction
• Install & Getting Started
• Best way to get started - understand the core system by writing your own. (PLEASE do this tutorial if you're interested in our projects!)
• How to write your own components
• Cookbook of example systems - how to build systems
• Component Reference

Some docs on how we work:

• How we go from playing with code to production code.
• How we do day to day, and longer management

We have a Template You Should Use

It's here: Summer of Code 2006 Template

Finally...

There's deadlines for student applications, and proposals coming up real soon. If you're interested, please don't leave it too late! Questions on specific projects, we'd rather answer on the projects page up top, you can also catch us on #kamaelia on freenode's IRC, and for general questions contact the list.