This is my blog post for the 5th week of the Google Summer of Code. I passed the first evaluation phase, so now the really hard work can begin.
(Also the first paycheck came in, and I bought a new Laptop. Obviously my only intention is to reduce compile times for Smack to be more productive *cough*).

The last week was mostly spent writing JUnit tests and finding bugs that way. I found that it is really hard to do unit tests for certain methods, which might be an indicator that there are too many side effects in my code and that there is room to improve. Sometimes when I need to save a state as a variable from within a method, I just go the easy way and create a new attribute for that. I should really try to improve on that front.

Also I did try to create an integration test for my jingle file transfer code. Unfortunately the sendFile method creates a new Thread and returns, so I have no real way of knowing when the file transfer is complete for now, which hinders me from creating a proper integration test. My plans are to go with a Future task to solve this issue, but I’ll have to figure out the most optimal way to bring Futures, Threads, (NIO) and the asynchronous Jingle protocol together. This will probably be the topic of the second coding phase 🙂

The implementation of the Jingles transport fallback functionality works! When a transport method (eg. SOCKS5) fails for some reason (eg. proxy servers are not reachable), then my implementation can fallback to another transport instead. In my case the session switches to an InBandBytestream transport since I have no other transports implemented yet, but theoretically the fallback method will try all available transports in the future.

I started on creating a small client/server application that will utilize NIO to handle multiple connections on a single thread as a small apprentice piece. I hope to get more familiar with NIO to start integrating non-blocking IO into the jingle filetransfer code.

In the last days I got some questions on my OMEMO module, which very nicely illustrated to me, that developing a piece of software does not only mean to write the code, but also maintain it and support the people that end up using it. My focus lays on my GSoC project though, so I mostly tell those people how to fix their issues on their own.

Last but not least a sort of political remark: In the end of the GSoC, students will receive a little gift from Google (typically a Tshirt). Unfortunatelly not all successful students will receive one due to some countries being “restricted”. Among those countries are Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, but also Mexico. It is sad to see, that politics made by few can affect so many.

Working together, regardless of where we come from, where we live and of course who we are, that is something that the world can and should learn from free software development.

Happy Hacking.