This year's Summer of Code is off to an awesome start! XMMS2 got a lot of amazing projects (and amazing proposals to begin with) this year. I will be mentoring Florian Ragwitz this year in his project to implement a testing framework for XMMS2. Florian had a really great idea in that he plans to make the framework a language-agnostic as possible with the common factor being a unified output format, in this case TAP. We're really excited about this because it will making writing tests as painless as possible, since everyone will be able to write them in their favorite language. It also makes testing things like language-bindings fit more seamlessly into our overall testing framework. Florian will also be working to implement a sandbox for running xmms2d as well as test-case media libraries and other good tools for writing better tests. I'm very excited to mentor this project, and I expect that Florian will provide XMMS2 with an amazing testing framework this summer!

The other projects XMMS2 was alloted slots for this summer are also really exciting. Johannes will be finally re-enabling visualization and he has some great ideas to make this both fast and portable as well as network transparent, by utilizing different transport mechanisms depending on where the client is located and on what platform xmms2d is running. Thomas will be working Autogenerated IPC which should make it much easier to right and get full coverage for XMMS2 bindings. This should also make coverage a lot more consistent, so we're very excited to see this kind of normalization being implemented for XMMS2. Finally Ning Shi will be working on Service Clients. this is an idea that theefer and I have tossed around for a while which will allow clients to implement method that other clients can execute with xmms2d mediating the communication between the two clients. We think this will allow for a lot more powerful features in every client, and will also reduce code replication since fancy features like MusicBrainz querying can be done by a service client instead of each client having to implement it on their own. Good luck to all of the students, we're really excited about this year!

On the FreeBSD side, I'm totally thrilled about some of the projects going on this summer! There is a big focus on performance this year, which in light of jeff@'s recent graphs is especially rewarding and exciting. I'm also happy to see a lot of work going on in the ports domain including the promise of parallelization which would probably really help on pointyhat and with all those new fancy dual core computers (anyone wanna send me one? :D). The one thing I was a little confused by was yet another installer project. I have no doubt that Ivan will do an awesome job but it seems like we have not one but two incomplete attempts to do this very thing, and I'm not clear why someone didn't try to pick up where those left off instead of trying to do it for a third time. Anyway, a new installer wouldn't hurt anyone so if this is what it takes then that's not so bad.

Again, good luck to all students, and let the games begin.