Google Summer of Code Ideas
Are you a GSOC student or mentor? Have questions? Contact us via IRC on #amahi on irc.freenode.net or on the amahi-devel mailing list.
If you are interested in being a mentor, we have six great mentors as of today, but we're very welcoming of more ideas and more mentors!
If you are a student, come talk to us about the ideas below for possible projects! Don't forget that these are subject to suggestions, extensions or adaptations. Even new ideas will be considered. Some of these ideas are more mature and concrete than others.
The most important thing is to find an area that you enjoy, using a programming language that you know or are willing to learn!
List of Project Ideas
Platform
Plugin System
Description: Make the ability to create and install Amahi Plugins easy and enable the creation of those plugins for a variety of purposes, like SMART monitoring, system stuff (network scanning, etc.) and the two examples below for the disk wizard and the Greyhole UI, among other ideas.
Objective: Create an amahi plugin system, where PHP, Python, Node, and other modern webapps can be easily integrated. We can currently do this with some RoR engines, but the mechanism is not robust enough. The plugins system should allow modern web-based apps to be easily integrated with Amahi -- from Node.js apps to Ruby/PHP/Python -- so that users can easily reap the benefits of the onslaught of difficult-to-deploy modern web apps with a single click install. ProTip: possibly leverage docker containers within Amahi
Skills Required: RoR, git
Mentors: Carlos, Rod
Disk Wizard
Description: Expanding the storage capacity is an important feature of Amahi but as of now it requires advanced (e.g. command line) skills. We want easy disk/partition onboarding. Also add the ability to be asked to mount USB drives as a share when they're connected & connect external shares from for example a NAS with the plugin system using that wizard.
Objective: Create an amahi plugin that will streamline this process by providing a UI for disk management. The plugin should detect if a new disk was added and it should provide a wizard to create partitions and format with the desired file system
Skills Required: Low level system scripting, git
Mentors: Dag, Bogdan
References:
- OpenMediaVault does have a nice wizard that people like
Greyhole UI
Description: Greyhole is an application that uses Samba to create a storage pool of all your available hard drives (whatever their size, however they're connected), and allows you to create redundant copies of the files you store, in order to prevent data loss when part of your hardware fails. The purpose of this plugin is to provide a UI and the necessary tools under the UI to make starting and managing a Greyhole UI possible and nice to understand for regular humans.
Objective: Create and amahi plugin that provides an UI that allows for the management of the greyhole pool. The plugin should allow an administrator user to: add/remove disks to/from the pool.
- change the number of copies for individual file/directory
- invoke various gh commands
- view and monitor log files
- gui to visualize data distribution
Skills Required: RoR, System programming, git
Mentors: Carlos, Rod
Backup app data/settings
Description: When new versions of Amahi come out, a drawback of Amahi is that it's hard to backup the settings (e.g. partitioning) installed applications and their user data
Objective: The plugin should allow an administrator to backup any application data either on an external media or in the cloud(e.g.: Dropbox, Google Drive, etc).The restore process should check if the application is installed on the HDA and if not it should be automatically installed from the AppStore before the user data is restored.
- Create an Amahi plugin that will allow backup and restore of the user data for apps installed from the AppStore
- Centralizing app data/configs - link them to app folder instead.
- "Destructive" update awareness
- Ability to list, outline data directories for backups/upgrade check
Skills Required: System scripting, git
Mentor: Rod, Daniel
Mobile
Mobile is a great topic at the moment and there are a lot of opportunities here. In the Android app, definitely more than one student are suitable for the project.
Android App Implementation
Description: There's huge demand for an Android application following the popularity of our iOS app. Our users are looking for an application that has feature parity with the existing iOS app, and even shows it up with additional features!
Objective: An Android app that is on par or better than the iOS app, including mobile streaming, downloading files and sharing them.
Skills Required: Java, Android, REST, JSON API programming, media interaction in Android, git
Mentor: Jesse Read, Carlos, Bogdan
Webapp Browsing in Mobile apps
Description: Add browsing of installed webapps within our mobile app.
Objective: One requested feature for our mobile app (iOS and later Android) is the ability to browse apps within our mobile app. Our server side of the app needs to be setup to proxy specific webapps that the user has installed.Collaboration with the iOS/Android devs will also be necessary to prototype it
Skills Required: Go programming, git
Mentors: Carlos, Bogdan
Reference: Amahi Github repo, in particular the SPDY and SPDY-proxy repos written in Golang
iOS App Improvement
Description: While Amahi has an iOS application already and it's loved among our users, there is a lot of room for improvement. For this project, we're looking to improve the existing iOS application and expand it's feature set. We're striving to make Amahi for iOS a polished, fast, and enjoyable application for our users.
Objective: We're looking to improve the the current implementation of the iOS project and add additional features, here is a list of requested features:
- Offer to display image-heavy folders and shares within a "gallery" or collection view.
- Offer the ability to navigate and stream shares containing music in a streamlined way.
- Dynamic search.
- SPDY support, for both remote and local queries.
- Support for accessing HDA web applications within Amahi for iOS.
- Share folders and files from your HDA to other apps or users.
- Support for HDA user permissions (share & web app restrictions, etc.)
- Add support for Dropbox, Google Drive, and other third-party services.
- Improve the first-launch user experience
- Add functionality to assist with HDA setup assistance
Skills Required:
- Objective-C/Cocoa
- Experience programming against a REST API would be helpful (Even input on improving and expanding the API!)
Mentors: Jesse Read, Carlos
Reference: Amahi for iOS
Reliability
CI Server for Apps
Description: App reliability is critical for Amahi. We have been striving to develop a customized CI (Continuous Integration) server for testing apps.
Objective: Develop up a CI server for apps (we have been calling a prototype "the app grinder") . The goal is to achieve 100% app installation and reliability. An important goal is to support a tester program for Amahi. We have a number of ideas of what we want to achieve -- how to design the CI server so that testers can easily see their passes, failures and anything in between.
Skills Required: Capybara, ruby, Webkit, Selenium, git, maybe Vagrant and system scripting. Other possible technologies could be Jenkins, Travis, etc.
Mentors: Carlos, Bogdan
App Sandboxing
Description: Use containers to improve app stability
Objective: Some apps may be more suitably installed inside a container because they may be too disruptive in a system. Can we you use popular sandboxing environments to contain apps that want to take over things, like Zimbra, or some PBX/VoIP systems, etc.
Skills Required: Docker, Vagrant (for testing), ruby, bash, Mbox, git
Mentor:: Carlos, Bogdan
Apps
Innovative app packaging or app related projects.
Caching Server
Description: a caching proxy to save on bandwidth
Objective: Develop and plugin that will allow an administrator user to control the traffic for specific devices inside the network. This app (or possibly a plugin) should display all the connected device as well as provide the ability to search by name/MAC address. For a selected device the administrator should:
- Limit access between certain time intervals
- Limit bandwidth
- Block certain websites (either on an individual basis or read them from a file)
- Limit traffic
Skills Required: system configuration and scripting, git
Mentors: Daniel, Jesse
Network Groups
Description: Develop a plugin to allow network device grouping. This will be the framework for future plugins.
Objective: Allow an administrator to group network devices in groups with different permissions. Limit the user access to certain apps based on the group settings.
Skills Required: RoR, system programming, git
Mentors: Jesse, Daniel
Create UI and package it for RSnapshot
Description: Make a UI for rsnapshot
Objective: RSnapshot is a great application to backup local data, making efficient use of storage as well as CPU resources and can handle a lot of data. A one-click app that includes a UI to set up and manage RSnapshot backups. Also, possibly backup to GDrive, S3, other cloud solutions
Skills Required: RoR, system programming, git
Mentor: Rod, Dag
References
Package VoIP and/or PBX system
Description: A frequently requested application that is hard to package and configure is a voice over IP telephony app. Related to this is also a PBX system
Objective: configuring PBX or a VoIP system can be complex. There are several hurdles to this. The task is to evaluate all
Skills Required: app scripting and packaging, telephony, VoIP, messaging systems, git
Mentors: Carlos, Pat
References:
- Asterisk
- [http://www.freepbx.org/ FreePBX
Installer
Improved Installation
Description: Improved installation experience for users. For example, create a new Anaconda node for Amahi configuration. Similarly for Ubuntu.
Objective: Configuration and installation of Amahi can be painful for some percentage of users. Many who do not know or care about Linux. We want to make the installation as smooth as possible not just for them, but for more even more regular (non-techy) users. Ubuntu has some challenges of its own to make it work without dropping the users to the command line.
- Make images that enable booting from USB devices "out of the box"
- Detect sub-optimal configurations of disk partitions and provide feedback to the user
- Measure and analyze how users get tripped on installation and create ways to tackle these issues, bringing installation issues down
Skills Required: Python, Linux boot process internals, creating ISO images, git
Mentors: Carlos, Daniel, Jesse
User Onboarding
Description: Help users get their HDA up and running with minimal interaction after installation
Objective: Happier users. The idea is to implement an automated configuration check tool. The current Amahi Interactive Troubleshooter can be used as a starting point. The tool should:
- check if the installation was successful
- compare current settings against the expected settings
- automatically fix inconsistencies with no user interaction
Skills Required: RoR, scripting, netflow capture, dhcping scripting, git
Mentors: Daniel, Carlos
Ubuntu 14.04
Description: Get Amahi ready for Ubuntu 14.04
Objective: Further development on the Amahi platform to be able to install the same applications and have the same features as the Fedora based version. A new install CD package that allows you to add Amahi functionality to Ubuntu 14.04 (LTS)
Skills Required: ruby, ISO creation, git
Mentor: Carlos, Frans
Networking
Clustering Amahi Servers
Description: Create a system to create data nodes that integrate with the Amahi API as well as auto mount as NFS or SMB shares to allow the usage of applications through locally mounted shares (such as gallery, subsonic etc). This would allow you to connect Windows / Linux computers as data nodes. Perhaps an installable agent?
Objective: An installer that integrates with Amahi (a stripped down version of Amahi?) and a management pane in the main amahi server that allows you to add a server by IP or DNS name.
Skills Required: Ruby, misc system scripting, git
Mentors: Carlos, Dan, Rod
Rolling Distribution
Description: Make Amahi a rolling distribution
Objective: Being able to upgrade Amahi versions without having to upgrade OSs is very appealing and a huge win.
Skills Required: major Linux packaging mojo, ruby, system scripting, ISO packaging, repo creation, git
Mentor: Carlos, Jesse Read
GUI and UX
This area can offer a lot of possibilities for ideas. A lot can be improved in Amahi to make the users happier. We are listing one topic here, but there are many, from a better front-end HTML (responsiveness, html5 compliance, browser compatibility, etc.), to CSS re-implementation, to allow for nice JS libraries to be used in plugins easily, like D3.js, Highcharts, etc., etc.
Better Theme Integration
Description: Our theme system is pretty good, however, it's very customized and we could do better with a more responsive front-end
Objective:
- allow the usage of popular themes out there, like themes for Drupal, Wordpress, etc., with minor configuration changes, or even directly
- allow the integration of mobile themes
- provide hooks to detect mobile devices and present a mobile theme
Skills Required: CSS, HTML5, ruby, RoR, git
Mentors: Jesse, Carlos
Other Ideas
- Integrate a mail server
- Router integration, UPNP, direct control
- Port AES (Amahi Energy Server) to Amahi 7
- Integration of LDAP as a back-end management system, calendaring
- Feature development (examples):
- Calendaring, and integrated contact manager application: possible work-around - owncloud
- For the more design-oriented, build mobile theme(s)
- PHP API: make it easy to customize the many apps that use php
Plus, of course we are open to suggestions. Open a dialog. We're happy to discuss and determine a suitable project.
Amahi is a platform that will support the deployment of other open source applications. If you are interested in the integration of applications in your area of interest, just contact us with suggestions.
