Final Report For My GSoC Project

I hope this report is not too late.

In the last 3 months, I implemented XEP-0136 for Prosody. This experience is really awesome: great mentor(Matthew Wild), active communities(Prosody, Gajim) and the wonderful organization(XSF), they've helped me a lot on this project. Many thanks to them! And, thanks to Google, who makes all of these possible, :)

What have been done

XEP-0136 is almost completely implemented:

• Archiving Preferences
• Automatic Archiving
• Manual Archiving
• Archive Management
• Replication

Not perfect, but workable.

The 3rd part of XEP-0136, Off The Record, is too complicated, and not practical I think. So MattJ and I decided not to implement this feature, and implement another "XEP" instead -- XEP-xxxx: Message Archive Management, which is a much simpler version of XEP-0136.

What to be done

I'll continue maintaining mod_archive and mod_archive_muc. There are still some little issues, and I'll fix them in the future.


All the code is available at prosody-modules. Any suggestions are welcome. :) Please report issues here, or contact me at shinysky1986 (A T) gmail dot com.

Week #11: mod_archive_muc

This week I implemented a new module: mod_archive_muc, a simple version of mod_archive, which is the implementation of XEP-0136.

In mod_archive_muc, we simply archive every message regardless of the collection. And retrieve them later with any combination of three filtering attributes - 'with', 'start' and 'end'. This is much simpler than mod_archive.

The Next Step:
* Go on finalizing the code.
* Do testings.
* Prepare for the final evaluation.

Week #10: Efficiency Improvement

Last week, I mainly focused on efficiency improvement, testing and bug fixing. Up to now, most of them are finished.

Improvements and Bug-fixing:
* Keep collections stored in REVERSE chronological order.
* Make sure result set are in chronological order(as specified in XEP-0136).
* Use binary search to improve collection inserting speed.
* Use util.jid.compare to do JID matching.
* Fix a bug about time stamp.
* Some other minor fixes.

The Next Step:
* Go on finalizing the code.
* Do some testings.

Week #9: Preferences Interpretation

This week I mainly finished these features:
* Interpreting preferences when performing automatic archiving, to determine whether archive the given message.
* Mapping an message to some collection based on timestamp, to determine which collection the give message should be archived into.

The next step:
* Keeping archived collections in chronological order.
* Making sure result sets returned to clients are sorted in chronological order.

Week #8: Replication

This week I implemented 'Replication'.
So the most part of this project has been finished. Yeah~

But, there are still a lot of TODO-es remain.
So in the next several weeks, I'll fix these problems.

Next step:
* Parsing preferences to determing whether archive the incoming messages or not.
* Mapping an message to some collection based on timestamp(?)

Week #7: Archive Management - Part II

This week I finished the implementation of "Archive Management", including:

1. Retrieving a list of collections
2. Retrieving a collection
3. Removing a collection

Actually, I've finished it on July 7. After that, I was always thinking about how to implement "Replication". This part(Replication) seems like implementing a "version control system"(Simpler, of course). I still can't figure out an efficient way to do this, so I decide to make it "workable" first.

Here is my thoughts:

1. Add a "access" attribute to chat element, representing the time this collection is last accessed(created/modified/removed).
2. modified_handler check this "access" attribute to determine if include this collection in the result set or not.
3. If a collection has no any child, that means it has been deleted.

The next step:

1. Mid-term Evaluation, :)
2. Replication

Week #6: Archive Management - Part I

This week and the next week(before the mid-term evaluation), I planned to implement these features:
* Retrieving a List of Collections
* Retrieving a Collection
* Removing a Collection

Actually, these features involve implementing XEP-0059: Result Set Management. So this part would take more time.

After this, I'll implement Replication.