Development/Summer of Code/2013

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Mentors

This year Robert Kaye, Oliver Charles and Kuno Woudt will probably be amongst our mentors. That's ruaok (Robert), warp (Kuno) and ocharles (Oliver) on IRC, if you want to come and speak to us first. Some potential mentors are listed by each project; this is far from a normative list, but it might give you somebody to ask about the project.

Suggestions

Right now these suggestions are primarily copied from our 2012 page. Add more ideas if you have them!

Repository for Creative Commons-licensed reviews

Proposed mentors: ruaok, ocharles, warp

There's been some discussion of implementing a system somewhat similar to the Cover Art Archive for Creative Commons-licensed album reviews. The BBC has a site for reviews which provides some of the functionality desired, but some folks would like us to have something more open and more our own; it's pretty open-ended at the moment what this could mean though.

Read-only, browser-oriented site

Proposed mentors: reosarevok, navap

There's been some discussion of implementing a site better geared toward casual browsing users, rather than editors, containing stuff like Wikipedia bios, reviews, embedded streaming for those recordings we have relationships for, etc. This is very open-ended at the moment, but some likely issues are in terms of maintainability (potentially two codebases!?), what exactly needs to be shown, effect on the existing site, etc. It's an open question whether this would constitute changes to the current site (when not logged-in, most likely) or whether this would be an additional site/codebase/view on our data.

Implement Webservice/Search using Hibernate Search Library

Proposed mentors: ijabz

Currently we don't have a proper seperation between mbserver and the database, we have a webservice that can be used to retrieve most things from the database but it is tied into mbserver. You cannot currently deploy only the webservice. We also have a seperate Search Server application that searches over Lucene indexes built from the database, this provides another part of the webservice but does not have access to the actual database at search time.

[Hibernate Search] is a library that brings together Lucene for searching and Hibernate ORM for retrieving data. I think it would be a perfect fit for us allowing us to provide a single web service with search and lookup in one. Data could be returned in multiple formats or as objects, and the advanced mapping features of Hibernate Core would solve the issues Musicbrainz has serving certain requests (such as all releases by Mozart). HIbernate Core also makes it easy to modify database and this could well as the basis for the editable webservice.

IMO would be very useful to try out using Hibernate Search for serving one entity (i.e Label) and see if it is worth pursuing further.

Rearchitect/Improve Release Editor

Proposed mentors: 'ocharles, warp, ?

The Release Editor is complex code which is currently pretty bug-ridden and hard to work with. It could use rearchitecting to be a lot more stable, performant, and easier to improve; probably its UI could use work too.

NOTE: this would be a huge project and probably requires some significant expertise. Especially UI-related changes are not well-defined and significant design would be needed. Apply with caution!

Proposals

About proposals

Before you dive in and send a proposal to us through Google, it's a good idea to take some time and learn about the MusicBrainz community. At MusicBrainz we pride ourselves for having a strong community - most of us know each other in same way, and some of us know each other face to face from development summits.

A good way to get a feel of this would be to lurk around in IRC, or to talk about your proposals on the mailing lists.