My co-workers and I have started to dig into the guts of an open source private p2p software package called Alliance. Overall it looks to be pretty well written and it has a nice UI so we have decided to spend some time working on it and adding some features we want. The current developers of the project are too busy to really do anything with it at the moment so, hopefully, the changes we make will be ones they like and will end up incorporating into the main release branch.
We’ve already fixed a few minor bugs and added a few small features. Right now the biggest new task we are working on is improving the search functionality to not just search across files based on their file name but also upon the meta data that is embedded within the file.
To grab the meta data from audio files we are also just using a portion of a different open source projected called “entagged” which will extract tag information from about 10 different audio file formats.
Once the audio file portion is done and working we will also do the same for video. I am not sure if we will spend much time working on any other formats though.
So far I have been pretty impressed by the existing code from both projects and, thanks to the good work each projects develeopers adding on is going pretty smoothly.
If you haven’t checked out Alliance before I recommend it. It’s a nice package. This is my first time messing around extending someone else’s open source project and so far I’ve been enjoying the work. Plus, it has been nice to muck with Java a bit more as I haven’t really used it with any rigorousness since 1999 (most of my time is spent dealing with CF, C#, PHP, and some occassional Ruby).
Comments
Bill
maciek,
thanks for stopping by. I will have to herd all the guys here together and get them to check in their changes.
Maciek
Hi there, stumbled upon this page while googling (yahooing actually..) for Alliance.
Did you complete the changes in the Alliance code? I’m one of the developers and I’d be happy to merge it into the Alliance 1.0 code base.
Feel free to post in the Alliance forum about this.