[GSoC] Questions about DPAP implementation

[Song Gao <song gao beta gmail com>]

Hi,

I am an undergraduate in Computer Science. I have experience as the principal programmer in two C# projects, one of which is supported by National Science Foundation of China.

I am interested in one of the Mono GSoC projects for F-Spot, aiming to implement a managed DPAP library, and I wish to apply to GSoC with this project. I have a few questions here:

1) It seems that DPAP is not an open protocol. I could not find any detailed document describing it. There's some document about Apple's services' ports usage, but it's far not sufficient to implement a library which is completely compatible with iPhoto. Do I need to analyze its network packets to acquire its details?

2) There's a DPAP library in Perl written by Leon Brocard (http://search.cpan.org/~lbrocard/Net-DPAP-Client/lib/Net/DPAP/Client.pm). Is it a good way to derive from it? (Of course the DPAP API in mono should be designed similar in usage to the DAAP used for banshee.) However it does not support password-protected shares. Is it because that encrypted data is hard to analyze? Is encryption included in the plan of this Mono library?

3) I found this in an Apple's mailing list: http://lists.apple.com/archives/bonjour-dev/2008/Jan/msg00022.html It seems that it is not allowed to implement DPAP independently from Apple, at least not allowed for commercial use. However, according to Mono GSoC rule, all of the code submitted must be contributed under the terms of the Apache 2.0 License, and Apache 2.0 allows commercial use. Is this a conflict?

Thanks in advance!

Warm regards,
Song Gao
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School of Computer Science
China University of Geosciences(Wuhan)

http://songgao.weebly.com/