Google Summer of Code 2015 Ideas

This page lists all project ideas for our Google Summer of Code 2015 application. Students should also visit our general GSoC 2015 page for more information including a Student Guide.

Implement a REST API in testman

Area: Enhancing web presence of ReactOS

Useful for: Developers

For its development, ReactOS project has been using with success for years a complete tools set. Each time a commit is made to our trunk, our buildbot infrastructure (https://build.reactos.org) is in charge of rebuilding trunk and starting a bunch of tests (circa 10M tests) on it to make sure not regressions came in. When these tests are done, they are uploaded to testman (https://www.reactos.org/testman), which makes them properly readable and usable for developers. Over years, the question of being able to catch more or less automatically regressions patterns was raised. Also, regtests provide a good performance indicator for ReactOS and evaluating their performances over commits can be critical as well.

There is then a need to be able to directly query Testman via an API to gather the raw data (tests, time to perform then) so that more tools can make use of these results. The student would then have the responsibility to implement such an API into testman directly.

Skills needed

• PHP/MySQL development
• REST API development

Difficulty

The project in itself shouldn't be difficult. Testman is a well-known product develop in-house. But a deep attention will have to be set on security and the performances of the API.

Extras

If the student goes fast enough, we will be able to extend this project, by for instance looking at how to develop a skeleton application to make use of the API. Or to directly develop a complete application to evaluate the performances of the tests over time.

Develop a spam honeypot

Area: Enhancing web presence of ReactOS

Useful for: End users

In spite of the deployement of various anti-spam features (including captchas and backlists), ReactOS forum has been the target of repeated spam attacks. These attacks ruined the good shape of boards while requiring extensive time from our admins. The idea here is to attempt a third strategy against spam to allow to automate the fight against spam. The student would have to develop a simple honeypot where spambots could spam providing major information: IP address, email address and message. This done, we could then automatically feed our backlist database for Drupal and phpBB not on assumptions but on facts.

Skills needed

• PHP/MySQL development
• Basic knowledge of phpBB & Drupal

Difficulty

This project should be easily completed by a student. This should offer him a bit of time to go into deeper features, described below.

Extras

If the student goes fast enough, two options are available for him. He can either develop an admin database so that we can easily review spam data in case of user complain, or he can start thinking about integrating the honeypot with our Drupal & phpBB and evaluation early performances of it. Third option is also available if he has suggestions!