On Mar 13, 2007, at 8:47 PM, pat eyler wrote:

> If you're not a student, but have a great idea, feel free to toss it
> out for discussion. Who knows, maybe someone will pick it up and run
> with it.

I think Event Machine is very ripe ground for Summer of Code  
projects.  It's already one of the coolest libraries out there for  
Ruby and the team has a lot of great ideas for making it even better.

One of their ideas is to build every protocol under the sun for it,  
so coders could just use EventMachine::HTTP or EventMachine::Telnet  
instead of having to work with the low-level plumbing.  There's even  
been mention of getting DRb running on top of EventMachine, which  
would likely make it quite a bit more robust and scalable.

The team also has interest in providing mid-level protocol building  
frameworks.  This would make it easier to add additional protocols.   
There are lots of interesting ideas to explore along this path to:   
protocol parser generators, DSLs for defining protocols, callback  
systems for reacting to protocol events, or even just generic event  
loops.

This project is very under loved and there's no reason it couldn't  
become the huge success POE is for Perl or Twisted is for Python.  If  
you're remotely interested in networking, I say jump on their mailing  
list and bounce some ideas off of them.

James Edward Gray II