# GSoC — Community Bonding Period

![](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1668355858026/6k2Bc01MG.png)

This year, the community bonding period was from April 22nd — May 22nd.. Though I was communicating with my mentor and community members frequently even before GSoC project results were announced (Yeah!!, I was pretty confident), this period was very very helpful and useful.

I took off from April 29th — May 10 for my semester exams and my mentors were comfortable with it. We had a hangout session before that and my mentor explained what is expected out during this community bonding period. There was a major change in the code base from the time when I wrote proposal and now. Here is the [previous code base](https://github.com/wso2/product-gw/) and here is the [new one](https://github.com/wso2/carbon-gateway-framework). Big change right.? Yes, I too felt the same and I panicked!! But my mentor and members of the org were very helpful and understood my situation. They guided me through it very well.

**Why a Load Balancer ?**

My project is to build a HTTP Load Balancer on Top of WSO2 Gateway. When I tell this to my friends few astonished ( yes, I wanted to build a kick-ass product !) and few ask my “Why a Load Balancer.?”, “It’s already there, Why re-invent the wheel.?”. First of all, I chose this organization because, [WSO2 ESB](http://wso2.com/products/enterprise-service-bus/) is the backbone of ebay! Yes, It helps ebay in handling [more than 1 billion transactions per day](http://wso2.com/casestudies/ebay-uses-100-open-source-wso2-esb-to-process-more-than-1-billion-transactions-per-day/)!! Pretty cool uh..? So what does gateway has to do with it.? This gateway-framework will be used to build next-gen-ESB.

WSO2 Gateway is a high performance, lightweight, low-latency messaging gateway based on standard gateway pattern. Its Netty based non-blocking IO and Disruptor (ringbuffer) architecture makes it the fastest open-source gateway available. [Performance Benchmarks](http://www.slideshare.net/kasun04/wso2-gateway?qid=9c8d89a4-e982-4883-87a8-ac2dca7bf223&v=&b=&from_search=1) (slide 13,14,15) shows that the gateway’s is very high when compared to other solutions and is close to the direct netty based backend (without any intermediate gateway).

***Features:***

*   Support for different Load Balancing Algorithms
*   Full Compliance with HTTP specification
*   Support for SSL
*   Session Persistence
*   Health Checking and Redirection

So, I am building a pretty cool LB which is based on non-blocking IO to achieve high performance and low-latency mediation.If everything goes well and I hope so, one day, this LB will be used by many organizations**.**

**Accomplishments so far:**

*   Understanding [carbon-gateway-framework’s](https://github.com/wso2/carbon-gateway-framework) code base and trying out few samples of [product-integration-server](https://github.com/wso2/product-integration-server)**.**
*   [Antlr 4](http://www.antlr.org/) grammar support for reading Load Balancer specific configurations.
*   Repository structure for a [standalone HTTP Load Balancer Server](https://github.com/Venkat2811/product-http-load-balancer)**.**

You guys can find my code in the above mentioned link. Thanks for reading.

*Originally published at* [https://venkat2811.blogspot.com/2016/05/gsoc-community-bonding-period.html](https://venkat2811.blogspot.com/2016/05/gsoc-community-bonding-period.html) *on May 23, 2016.*