One of the great things about Google Summer of Code™ is that it's a great way to meet other Open Source-minded people. Not only do students get paired with their mentors, but students get to know each other, as do mentors and project administrators.
Last month, Leslie Hawthorn, Cat Allman, and I attended the Google Summer of Code Birds of a Feather session at Open Source Bridge, organized by Jonathan Leto. We had the pleasure of meeting with Google Summer of Code students, mentors, admins, and potential participants to discuss what works, what doesn't work, and ways the program could be improved. We got some great feedback, and best of all, we had the opportunity to interact face to face with participants instead of solely via email, mailing lists, or IRC! You can see a photo and read more about the meetup on Jonathan's blog post about the event.
Last week, the Open Source Programs Office outreach team met with more Google Summer of Code participants at our BoF session at OSCON. Our session extended late into the night with some really interesting discussions about how to help students succeed in computer science.
If you would like to know about upcoming Google Summer of Code meetups, please join our meetups mailing list - we'd love to meet you!
Posts from July 2009
Programming made Simple!
Monday, July 27, 2009
In the 90s, a big company from up north was extremely successful with a dialect of the programming language BASIC (acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code). One of the reasons it was so successful was that the language was easy to learn and use.
Bringing an easy to learn and use language to the mobile world and the Android platform is the goal of the Simple project. Simple is a BASIC dialect for developing Android applications. It is particularly well suited for non-professional programmers (but not limited to). Simple allows programmers to quickly write Android applications by using the components supplied by its runtime system.
Similar to its 90s relative, Simple programs are form definitions (which contain components) and code (which contains the program logic). The interaction between the components and the program logic happens through events triggered by the components. The program logic consists of event handlers which contain code reacting to the events. In reality it is even simpler than this description.
Let's see how simple it really is. We will quickly write a program simulating the famous Etch-A-Sketch on an Android device. Tilting the device will move the pen, shaking the device will clear the screen. The Simple runtime system gives us three components to provide most of the needed functionality:
The code defines two global variables (lines 1 and 2) and two event handlers, one to handle changes in the device's tilt (lines 4 to 17) and another to handle shaking of the device (lines 19 to 21). The code in the first event handler makes sure to only react to tilting above a certain degree (lines 6, 8, 11 and 13), and if that is the case then it further ensures that the pen does not run off the drawing surface (lines 7, 9, 12 and 14). And finally a point is drawn at the pen position (line 16). As for the other event handler, the only thing it does is clearing the drawing surface in case of shaking (line 20).
Last part missing is the form definition. It defines the form and its properties (lines 24 to 27), followed by the components it contains (lines 28 to 33).
That's it. The only thing left to do is to compile and deploy the application to an Android device. And voila, here is a screenshot of the application running:
For a definition of the Simple language see the Simple Language Definition (download, 199 KB PDF). For more information on writing Simple applications see the open source project page at code.google.com/p/simple. You can also find information there on contributing to the project, and we encourage you to join our discussion list to provide us feedback.
Programming made Simple!
Bringing an easy to learn and use language to the mobile world and the Android platform is the goal of the Simple project. Simple is a BASIC dialect for developing Android applications. It is particularly well suited for non-professional programmers (but not limited to). Simple allows programmers to quickly write Android applications by using the components supplied by its runtime system.
Similar to its 90s relative, Simple programs are form definitions (which contain components) and code (which contains the program logic). The interaction between the components and the program logic happens through events triggered by the components. The program logic consists of event handlers which contain code reacting to the events. In reality it is even simpler than this description.
Let's see how simple it really is. We will quickly write a program simulating the famous Etch-A-Sketch on an Android device. Tilting the device will move the pen, shaking the device will clear the screen. The Simple runtime system gives us three components to provide most of the needed functionality:
- the Canvas component - for drawing
- the OrientationSensor component - to detect tilting
- the Accelerometer component to detect shaking
| 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 | Dim x As Integer Dim y As Integer Event OrientationSensor1.OrientationChanged(yaw As Single, _ pitch As Single, roll As Single) If roll < -20 Then x = Math.Min(Canvas1.Width, x + 1) ElseIf roll > 20 Then x = Math.Max(0, x - 1) End If If pitch < -20 Then y = Math.Min(Canvas1.Height, y + 1) ElseIf pitch > 20 Then y = Math.Max(0, y - 1) End If Canvas1.DrawPoint(x, y) End Event Event AccelerometerSensor1.Shaking() Canvas1.Clear() End Event |
The code defines two global variables (lines 1 and 2) and two event handlers, one to handle changes in the device's tilt (lines 4 to 17) and another to handle shaking of the device (lines 19 to 21). The code in the first event handler makes sure to only react to tilting above a certain degree (lines 6, 8, 11 and 13), and if that is the case then it further ensures that the pen does not run off the drawing surface (lines 7, 9, 12 and 14). And finally a point is drawn at the pen position (line 16). As for the other event handler, the only thing it does is clearing the drawing surface in case of shaking (line 20).
Last part missing is the form definition. It defines the form and its properties (lines 24 to 27), followed by the components it contains (lines 28 to 33).
| 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 | $Properties $Source $Form $Define EtchSketch $As Form Layout = 3 BackgroundColor = &HFFFFFFFF Title = "EtchSketch: Tilt to draw - Shake to clear" $Define Canvas1 $As Canvas $End $Define $Define OrientationSensor1 $As OrientationSensor $End $Define $Define AccelerometerSensor1 $As AccelerometerSensor $End $Define $End $Define $End $Properties |
That's it. The only thing left to do is to compile and deploy the application to an Android device. And voila, here is a screenshot of the application running:
For a definition of the Simple language see the Simple Language Definition (download, 199 KB PDF). For more information on writing Simple applications see the open source project page at code.google.com/p/simple. You can also find information there on contributing to the project, and we encourage you to join our discussion list to provide us feedback.Programming made Simple!
Midterm Report on Google Summer of Code
Saturday, July 25, 2009
(click on graph to enlarge)For the rest of the students, the summer is not over yet and there is still lots of coding left to do. I hope that this year will be our most successful to date! Read the statistics about previous years here.
By Ellen Ko, Open Source Team
Congratulations to the Winners of the Google O'Reilly Open Source Awards
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Yesterday evening, I was privileged to share a stage with OSCON Co-Chair, Allison Randal to present the 5th Annual Google O'Reilly Open Source Awards. We once again opened nominations to the Open Source world at large and we were pleased at the fantastic response we received from the community. From the hundreds of nominations we received, after much deliberation these five individuals were selected:
- Brian Aker, Best Open Source Database Hacker for his work on Drizzle and MySQL
- Bruce Momjian, Database Jedi Master for his work on