ECF/Google services for ECF

Google Services Provider for ECF

This document gives an overview of GSoC 2009 project proposal created by [Nuwan Samarasekera].

Project Motivation

Google Talk provides more features than standard XMPP (although primarily based on it). Hence, having to use the standard XMPP provider in ECF for communication with Google Talk users is a disadvantage since ECF will not be able to utilize the full potential of Google services which includes voice chat, video chat, off the record chatting, Integration with GMail etc.[1]

Therefore, it will be beneficial for the ECF and the Eclipse community to have a specific Google services provider under ECF, thus enabling the users of ECF to utilize all the services provided by Google Talk.

Project Goals

During the Google Summer Code 2009, the followings requirements will be met: + Extend the current ECF XMPP Provider to create a specific Google Services provider, with Chat as the first service.

+ Implement the following extensions provided by Google Talk:

       -Support for user settings handling
       -Off the record chatting
       -Integration with GMail (receiving email notifications)
       -voicemail
       -utilize extended contact attributes
       -VoIP
       -Video chat

+ Once Google Voice is available in time, extend the provider to support Google Voice[2]. The following features will be implemented during this program.

       - Call initiation
       - Screening of calls
       - Subscribe to get notifications
       - Receive transcripts of voicemails
  

+ Provide UI integration of the Google services provider to the eclipse platform. The UI will be designed with improved user accessibility for all supported features in a more intuitive and user friendly manner.

   - A unified UI which will allow access to all the aforesaid communication tasks will be made available.
   - Users will be able to invoke tasks by typed commands.For example typing "#file myFile.txt " will send myFile.txt in the current workspace to the contact the user is currently chatting        with. The user will be given the freedom to have this option off.
  

Benefits to the Eclipse Community

ECF gets extended further as a communications platform. Integrated chat, and utilization of Google Services listed above, will be useful for both developers and users of Eclipse platform. There are a number of commercial use cases available.

In addition to that, with the suggested UI and user accessibility improvements such as accessing all features from a unified user interface, and faster methods of accessing the features (typed commands), ECF will get higher user acceptance.

Possible Mentor

James Sugrue Marcelo Mayworm Scott Lewis

Deliverables

1. project design and architecture

2. Google Services Provider implementation for ECF 3. UI implementation of the provider integrated with Eclipse platform

 3a. Future work will include an RAP implementation of the UI 

4. Testing report

5. User and Developer documentations

Future Work

I will work on providing an RAP implementation of the completed Google services provider in the future. This will enable users to have access to the functionalities provided by the Google services provider through the web as well.

In addition to that, Google voice integration with the provider will be extended to support more advanced features provided by Google voice.

References

[1] http://code.google.com/apis/talk/jep_extensions/extensions.html

[2] http://www.google.com/voice/about