Hi Mark Thomas, This is regarding Google Summer of Code Project - "*Convert current Tomcat valves to Servlet Filters**"* by ASF.
I'm Vinod Kumar, a 2nd year undergraduate btech student in Computer Science and Engineering Department at Indian Institute of Technology(IIT), Bombay, India. I came to know about GSoC just 5-6 days ago and i'm very much excited about this idea of open source software development. I love Apache Software Foundation for its useful resources. The first open source software i know is "Eclipse" and next "Apache Tomcat","Apache Lucene" - as these were used by me in my Information retrival project. I came to about these open sources from my guide and i was impressed and excited about these free resources completely supported by excellent developers. I thought i must also contribute to these opensources as these are very helpful tools. This is a worderful opportunity provided by Google and Apache through Google Summer of Code(GSoC) - only for students. I thought i may contribute to apache sometime later after my graduation but now i hope i got an opportunity right in my undergraduation and i don't want to miss this opportunity - hence would like to apply for this project which involves exploring complete Apache Tomcat project and changing the code to have required thing implemented. As i'm a computer science student, i'm having good experience in coding. I worked on a project - "Network Routing Simulations" which involved lot and lot of coding and ofcourse basic study of computer networks - TCP/IP protocols and Routing algos. I also worked on a project - "Information Retrival from the Desktop" using Apache Lucene and Apache Tomcat - for servlet and jsps - this is like basic version of Google Desktop. I'm very much interested in coding and i coded small simple games like chess, billiards, sudoko. I'm very comfortable with Java Core. I also worked with servlets and jsps. I'm very much excited about this project which helps me in start-off to contribute to apache. As this project involves understanding of Apache Tomcat and next converting valves to filters, i hope i'll be able to answer some of the difficulties which people face while using tomcat and hence i can also contribute to the community by answering the queries. I would like to be one among the apache community. I hope Mark Thomas reads this and responds. Thank you, Vinod Kumar 2nd year Undergraduate Student in Computer Science and Engineering(CSE) Department Indian Institute of Technology(IIT) Bombay India.
