[Cosmo-dev] Introducing myself

[Tim Pokorny]

Hello all,

My name is Tim Pokorny and I am a current Google Summer of Code  
student. I have been advised to send in an email introducing myself  
and what I'll be doing, so here I am!

Bobby Rullo is my mentor for this thing, so if he starts to look  
really annoyed and goes around muttering things about wanting to kill  
all Aussies any more than normal, it'll be my fault. If it is more  
like wanting to kill all humans, then you've probably been watching  
too much Futurama (as if such a thing is possible).

Briefly about me
-----------------------
I'm a PhD student (almost finished) at the University of Ballarat in  
Ballarat, Australia (about 100km outside Melbourne) (GMT +10 for  
those who are interested). To stave off boredom with academics I run  
a couple of open source projects related to distributed simulation.  
Since my scholarships expired a little while ago I've been working  
for a company based out of Perth in Western Australia on one of these  
projects (http://sourceforge.net/projects/jarti) and the Australian  
Defence Force has just agreed to throw some money into the project to  
fund further development. I've been developing in Java for around 6  
years now, but have VERY minimal webapp experience, hence my  
eagerness to start learning and contribute some stuff to Cosmo.

I have a blog at http://tim.littlebluefrog.com, but have rarely had  
the time to update it in recently.

Briefly about the project
---------------------------------
My GSoC project aims to provide Comet-event style notifications to  
the Cosmo UI. The basic premise behind Comet it to allow asynchronous  
messages to be pushed back from the server to the client without any  
prompting. Thus, when events of interest occur within the server,  
they can be pushed out to any clients viewing the relevant data.

For example, if your wife or girlfriend were to add an event to your  
calendar, claiming your for an entire Sunday when you'd just rather  
be at home with a few cold ones watching TV, anyone viewing your  
calendar at the time would see it automatically update (rather than  
having to wait for the page to be refreshed, or, in the case of Ajax,  
the server to be polled). I think we can all agree that if your lazy  
Sunday is about to be ruined by a trip to the Ballet, or some other  
equally excruciating event, immediate notification would be handy. At  
the least, if any of your mates happen to be viewing your data, at  
least they'll know right away that mockery is required.

I've created some space on the wiki and will be putting up a basic  
plan for comment at some point in the near future. I'll fire an email  
back here when there is something worth setting fire to.

OK, enough email writing, I should probably start procrastinating. My  
IRC nick is "tpokorny", so if you see me hanging around, be sure to  
say hi. I've already offered Bobby a bribe of womats for various  
things, if you are nice, perhaps you too can get a piece of that action.

Cheers,
Tim