Leslie Hawthorn of the Open Source Programs team is heading to the bright lights of Las Vegas to speak at Joomla! Day Las Vegas coming up April 3rd through April 5th, 2009. If you are interested in Joomla!, haven't had a chance to hear LH speak before, or just want to hang out with some past Google Summer of Code participants, don't miss it.
Hope to see you there.
Posts from March 2009
POP and IMAP Troubleshooter
The POP and IMAP Troubleshooter is a wizard-like application that people can use to diagnose and repair problems when connecting to email service providers. It reads the configuration files of several email clients, checks them for appropriate settings, and then attempts to create a connection to the provider's servers. You can compile a generic version that allows you to connect to arbitrary servers, or a provider-specific version that can check additional constraints, such as the correct IMAP server name. Google's own binary is available from our Gmail support pages. The troubleshooter is written in C++ using Qt, and can be built for Linux, Windows, and the Mac.
We welcome your feedback. Check out the code and join our discussion group. Happy hacking!
We welcome your feedback. Check out the code and join our discussion group. Happy hacking!
Reminder: Applications for Google Summer of Code™ 2009 Due Friday
Monday, March 30, 2009
We're entering the home stretch for the student application period for Google Summer of Code 2009! With 150 Free and Open Source software projects acting as mentoring organizations this year, we have a little bit of something for everyone. Students have until Friday at 19:00 UTC to submit proposals to work on a three month coding project with a mentor from academia or industry.
If you're searching for inspiration or a bit more information while you talk about your ideas with your would-be mentors, you may be interested in the latest installment of the Code Conversations series from the Google Code Blog. We share some past success stories, tips for student applicants and a bit more about Melange, the software that powers the Google Summer of Code 2009 site.
Ready to apply now? Take a look at our Frequently Asked Questions page and get ready to submit your proposal. As always, helpful and knowledgeable folks are hanging around in #gsoc on Freenode to answer your questions, or you can subscribe to the program discussion list for news and updates.
Remember, all applications are due by 19:00 UTC this Friday, April 3rd. Best of luck to all our applicants!
If you're searching for inspiration or a bit more information while you talk about your ideas with your would-be mentors, you may be interested in the latest installment of the Code Conversations series from the Google Code Blog. We share some past success stories, tips for student applicants and a bit more about Melange, the software that powers the Google Summer of Code 2009 site.
Ready to apply now? Take a look at our Frequently Asked Questions page and get ready to submit your proposal. As always, helpful and knowledgeable folks are hanging around in #gsoc on Freenode to answer your questions, or you can subscribe to the program discussion list for news and updates.
Remember, all applications are due by 19:00 UTC this Friday, April 3rd. Best of luck to all our applicants!
Nixysa: Scriptable Plugins for Browsers
Nixysa is a new tool for developers who want to create scriptable plug-ins for NPAPI-supporting browsers such as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. Currently, exposing significant APIs via JavaScript is a tedious and repetitive process, but Nixysa lets you declare your API with a simple Interface Description Language. It also generates all the glue code that is needed to script your classes directly from the browser. If you want to add fancy features to web browsers, you can focus on the code that enables cool functionality instead of the boilerplate glue. As a bonus, Nixysa also works with Native Client which makes it easier to create NPAPI modules, providing a secure way of running native code in the browser.
We welcome your feedback. Check out the source code and take our sample code for a test drive. We look forward to hearing from you on our project discussion list.
We welcome your feedback. Check out the source code and take our sample code for a test drive. We look forward to hearing from you on our project discussion list.
DrupalCon DC
Friday, March 27, 2009
Dmitri Gaskin speaking at DrupalCon DC, photo by kcolwellHello World! I'm Dmitri Gaskin, I'm 13 years old, and a Drupal Developer. I was a mentor for the Google Highly Open Participation™ Contest in late 2007 (I was too young to actually participate in the contest, having just turned 12), a mentor for Google Summer of Code™ in 2008 , and will return to mentor Google Summer of Code in 2009.
Drupal is a Content Management System with an awesome community behind it. I've been a member of the Drupal community for a bit over 3 years. I've written patches for Drupal core (what you get when you get when you download "Drupal") and for many modules (Drupalspeak for "add-ons"). I've built some small sites with Drupal, but I usually contribute back more that I actually use it and that's fine by me - with such an amazing community, contributing is fun.
Earlier this month, Google's Open Source team sponsored my attendance at DrupalCon DC. DrupalCon is Drupal's official twice-yearly conference. This year was amazing! With over 1400 people and over 100 sessions, it was the largest DrupalCon ever. I presented a session on jQuery and co-presented sessions on Installation Profiles and the Intro to SimpleTest. Probably the best part of the conference for me was meeting so many people in person who I had only known over IRC or in Drupal's Issue Queues.
I attended sessions on a variety of subjects, including API building, semantic web, and usability testing, among other things. I even managed to squeeze some time in to practice the piano at the University of D.C. One theme I noticed during the conference (however I was one of the first to talk about it at the conference so it may be partially my fault) was how to improve the install system of Drupal. The current system is less than ideal, so we tried to think of ways to fix it (Hint: it's not easy and we still aren't 100% sure of what the best solution is).
Overall, DrupalCon DC was a lot of fun and I'll do all I can to attend the next DrupalCon (although the dates conflict with school and I'll be going to a new school next year). I am really grateful to Google for helping to make it possible for me to attend.
Open Sourcerers at Google I/O
Thursday, March 26, 2009
In or around San Francisco on May 27-28th? If you are, why not check out Google I/O 2009, the 2nd occurrence of Google's largest developer conference. Among the many other great sessions, you can hear our very own Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick discuss Programmer Insecurity and the Genius Myth and hear their thoughts on creating happy users in their talk Do You Believe in the Users? We hope to see you there!
Spreading the Summer Love in South America
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
You may recall the recent post by Borja Sotomayor about the five Google Summer of Code™ information sessions he organized in the Chicago, USA area. Several other students and mentors are following in Borja's footsteps, and we'll be bringing you news about many of these meetups. Most recently, several former students have been busy spreading the word about the program to students at their local universities in South America.
Five former students teamed up to promote the program at the University of Campinas in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Bruno Cardoso, Bruno Dilly, Luis Felipe Strano Moraes, João Batista Correa Gomes Moreira and João Paulo Rechi Vita spoke to a packed lecture hall, showcasing the strong past participation of University of Campinas students. They also dispensed some advice about how to apply, including best practices for community interaction, and shared a bit about their past experience as students in the program. You can find more details, including pictures from the session, on João Paulo Rechi Vita's blog.
Rodrigo Lazo arranged an information session at the San Pablo Catholic University in Arequipa, Peru. About 50 people came to the session, meaning standing room only for a few of the attendees. In addition to telling folks more about the program and how to write a successful proposal, Rodrigo also educated them about Open Source software: what it is, why people write and release Open Source code and why getting involved in the Open Source world is exciting and rewarding.
Have you hosted a Google Summer of Code information session at your local school or computer club? Are you planning to host one? Let us know! Share your plans, results and thoughts in the comments section or on the program discussion list.
Five former students teamed up to promote the program at the University of Campinas in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Bruno Cardoso, Bruno Dilly, Luis Felipe Strano Moraes, João Batista Correa Gomes Moreira and João Paulo Rechi Vita spoke to a packed lecture hall, showcasing the strong past participation of University of Campinas students. They also dispensed some advice about how to apply, including best practices for community interaction, and shared a bit about their past experience as students in the program. You can find more details, including pictures from the session, on João Paulo Rechi Vita's blog.
Rodrigo Lazo presents at the San Pablo Catholic University
Rodrigo Lazo arranged an information session at the San Pablo Catholic University in Arequipa, Peru. About 50 people came to the session, meaning standing room only for a few of the attendees. In addition to telling folks more about the program and how to write a successful proposal, Rodrigo also educated them about Open Source software: what it is, why people write and release Open Source code and why getting involved in the Open Source world is exciting and rewarding.
Standing room only at the information session in Arequipa, Peru
Have you hosted a Google Summer of Code information session at your local school or computer club? Are you planning to host one? Let us know! Share your plans, results and thoughts in the comments section or on the program discussion list.
PHP Quebec 2009
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
I recently attended PHP Quebec 2009. This was the seventh year of this gathering of PHP developers and though we had a new venue the conference was great as always. As one of my fellow speakers was ill, I jumped in to give the Writing PHP Extensions (PDF) talk along with Johannes Schluter. Even better, the talk on PHP - Worst Practices (PDF) was well received by the audience, with reactions to the material far more positive than I would have anticipated given that we've all engaged in these worst practices from time to time. You can also check out the slides from my third talk Objects for the Masses (PDF). On a more personal note, I was happy to hear and see that other presenters used the Google Chart API in their talks for examples.
The rest of the conference talks were luckily not completely focused on PHP 5.3. It turns out there's continued interest in the current stable platform, PHP 5.2. Folks are happy to give us core developers more time to add some new features, most notably