gsoc2009

There have been some exciting developments from our Google Summer of Code and Haiku Code Drive students, even though it is only the first of three month. Here's a brief summary from most of the students. Be sure to visit their blogs for additional information and the occasional screenshot.

Adrien Destugues

Lately, his work has been focusing on the catalogs for translating applications. These provide the mappings from one language to another. The initial mechanism is functional with Haiku's API and allows any application to be translated. This functionality is better explained in his blog post. The International Components for Unicode or simply known as "ICU" and a preflet for selecting the desired locale are other major aspects to be implemented. Amongst other features, ICU will provide the formatting conversions for date, time, monetary, and locale specific characters. Further down the road (and beyond GSoC) is an API wrapper for the gettext library, which can interface with posix applications.

Maxime Simon

Maxime and his mentor, Ryan Leavengood have been working together on both laying the foundation for a native browser, as well as updating WebKit to the newest codebase. In short, some of Maxime's work has been on browser specific features, including the bookmarking library, toolbar, and designing the multiple rendering processes support. Earlier this month, his work has shifted towards WebKit. Primarily migrating the Haiku specific code from the previous port to the current codebase and continuing it. For a more in depth explanation, look at his most recent blog post.

Johannes Wischert

Earlier this week, his Gumstix Overo Water and Tobi expansion board arrived. Previously he has been using Qemu to emulate a Gumstix verdex as a testbed. His work has been focusing on the kernel and u-boot loader. The u-boot loader will be capable of loading the haiku_loader, which in turn will load kernel directly from a BFS partition. MMU related code and a driver for the microSD card reader are planned to be worked on next.

Bryce Groff

Several patches have landed in Haiku's source tree; changesets: 31234, 31235, 31236, and 31237. These allow BFS partitions to be created and deleted. On a side note -- testing of DriveSetup has been done inside Haiku running inside Qemu on Haiku!

Ankur Sethi

CLucene has been ported to Haiku and exists as an OptionalPackage for the build system. CLucene is the library that provides the searching APIs. The indexing daemon has some initial functionality. One of the responsibilities of the indexing daemon is to determine which files need to be indexed or to have their indexed data refreshed. Being able to search the results and handling non-plain text files via translators are two items that are on his todo list.

Raghu Nagireddy

The FUSE module hooks for almost all the necessary functions have been implemented. Most of the remaining functions that will be implemented are of lesser importance and require some research into Haiku's kernel Virtual File System. After that, the remaining work would be to get the FUSE library compiled with fs-shell, eg adding the necessary Jam rules. Since the FUSE module is host system binary, it can be debugged using tools of his host platform.

We are pleased to announce that Google has allotted us with six students for this year's Summer of Code program! This is quite an achievement, seeing as how Google accepted only 1000 students, which is about 10% less than in 2008. As with the year before, the quality of the proposals submitted by students has increased significantly. This year, students who applied to Haiku were suggested to fix an issue in our bug tracker. This provided our mentors with a glimpse into the students' programming ability, as well as their ambition. Those contributions, several of which have already been committed to our SVN repository, proved to be a valuable resource when ranking the students. This allowed our mentors to strike a balance between projects that fill a need in Haiku and projects by students who have also shown themselves to be a worthy Google Summer of Code student. These students went above and beyond our requirements and expectations. They gave us hope that come October, November, and beyond, they will still be making contributions to our community. Since retaining students as community developers is one of the goals of Summer of Code, it weighed heavily in our decision. Without further ado, here is the list of students who will be sponsored by Google to contribute to Haiku in Google's Summer of Code 2009:

Internationalization support for Haiku

• Student: Adrien Destugues
• Mentor: Oliver Tappe
• Project Summary

CIFS client Implementation

• Student : Obaro Ogbo
• Mentor : Bruno Albuquerque
• Project Summary

Port Haiku to ARM architecture

• Student : Johannes Wischert
• Mentor : François Revol
• Project Summary

Update DriveSetup/Disk_Device

• Student : Bryce Groff
• Mentor : Ingo Weinhold
• Project Summary

Integrate WebKit in Haiku native browser

• Student : Maxime Simon
• Mentor : Ryan Leavengood
• Project Summary

Implementing ZeroConf support for Haiku with mDNSResponder

• Student : jie ma
• Mentor : Axel Dörfler
• Project Summary

We encourage everyone to continue the hospitality that has always been a part of our community. This has become a well-earned reputation for the members of Haiku's community.

We would like to take this time to express our gratitude for all students who have submitted project proposals. Many of you have displayed that your abilities rival those who were accepted. It is an unfortunate situation that we were not allocated more student slots by Google. We are looking at ways to express our appreciation of your efforts so far. In addition we are investigating the possibility of sponsoring another Haiku Code Drive. At this point, no decision has been made and we are welcoming comments on regarding this matter. If you would like feedback regarding your proposal and suggestions for next year, feel free to contact (Matt Madia).

Thank you to all who have and continue to take the time to make Haiku's participation in Google Summer of Code a successful adventure. This includes Google for sponsoring Summer of Code, the Melange developers and contributors, and of course Haiku's Mentors.