Google Summer of Code 2012 is on!

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team

Cross-posted with the Google Open Source Blog

Today at FOSDEM I was proud to announce Google Summer of Code 2012.

This will be the 8th year for Google Summer of Code, an innovative program dedicated to introducing students from colleges and universities around the world to open source software development. The program offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects with the help of mentoring organizations from all around the globe. Over the past seven years Google Summer of Code has had 6,000 students from over 90 countries complete the program. Our goal is to help these students pursue academic challenges over the summer break while they create and release open source code for the benefit of all.

Spread the word to your friends! If you know of a university student that would be interested in working on open source projects this summer, or if you know of an organization that might want to mentor students to work on their open source projects, please direct them to our Google Summer of Code 2012 website where they can find our timeline along with the FAQs. And stay tuned for more details coming soon!


Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Google Code-in: Are you in?

By Carol Smith, Google Code-in Program Manager, Open Source Team

Cross-posted from the Google Open Source Blog


Listen up, future coders of the world: today we’re launching the second annual Google Code-in competition, an open source development contest for 13-17 year old students around the world. The purpose of the Google Code-in competition is to give students everywhere an opportunity to explore the world of open source development. We not only run open source software throughout our business, we also value the way the open source model encourages people to work together on shared goals over the Internet.

Open source development involves much more than just computer programming, and the Google Code-in competition reflects that by having lots of different tasks to choose from. We organize the tasks into eight major categories:

1. Code: Writing or refactoring code
2. Documentation: Creating and editing documents
3. Outreach: Community management and outreach, as well as marketing
4. Quality Assurance: Testing and ensuring code is of high quality
5. Research: Studying a problem and recommending solutions
6. Training: Helping others learn more
7. Translation: Localization (adapting code to your region and language)
8. User interface: User experience research or user interface design and interaction

On November 9, we’ll announce the participating mentoring organizations. Mentoring organizations are open source software organizations chosen from a pool of applicants who have participated in our Google Summer of Code program in the past. Last year we had 20 organizations participate.

Last year’s competition drew 361 participating students from 48 countries, who worked for two months on a wide variety of brain-teasing tasks ranging from coding to video editing, all in support of open source software. In January, we announced the 14 grand prize winners, who we flew to our headquarters in Mountain View, California to enjoy a day talking to Google engineers and learning what it’s like to work at Google, and another day enjoying the northern California sights and sun.

Visit the Frequently Asked Questions page on the Google Code-in site for more details on how to sign up and participate. Our goal this year is to have even more pre-university students in the contest than last time around, so help us spread the word, too.

Stay tuned to the contest site and subscribe to our mailing list for more updates on the contest. The Google Code-in contest starts on November 21, 2011, and we look forward to seeing the clever and creative ways all of the participants tackle their open source challenges.


Carol Smith is Google Code-in Program Manager, Open Source Team

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Announcing Git Support for Google Code Project Hosting

By Dave Borowitz, Google Git Engineer, with thanks to Augie Fackler, Lucas Bergman, Jacob Lee, and Shawn Pearce

Cross-posted from the Google Open Source Blog

We’re pleased to announce today that in addition to supporting the Subversion and Mercurial version control systems, Google Code Project Hosting now supports Git. Git is a popular distributed version control system (DVCS) like Mercurial, and it is used by many popular projects including the Linux kernel and Android.

Now, when you create a project or visit your existing project’s Administration > Source tab, you have the option of choosing Git as your version control system. You’ll enjoy all the same great Google Project Hosting features, like project updates, advanced issue tracking, and an easy-to-use VCS-backed wiki—only now, you can do it with Git. You can also create an instant server-side clone of any existing Git repository by clicking the "Create a clone" button on the project’s checkout page.

For more information, including an introduction to Git and tips on converting existing Subversion and Mercurial repositories, see the new Git section of our support wiki.

Under the Hood

Since our original announcement of Mercurial support, Git has grown significantly more popular and user-friendly, and on the technical side, it has added an efficient "smart" HTTP protocol that fits with Google’s HTTP-based infrastructure. (Note that this feature is only available in version 1.6.6 and later.)

Like our Mercurial implementation, our Git implementation stores object data in a custom data store built on Bigtable, which provides us with efficient, scalable source code repositories with near-instantaneous replication to multiple datacenters around the world. To fit with our existing Python-based system, our Git server implementation is powered in part by Dulwich.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

WindowBuilder becomes new open source project with major code contribution to Eclipse Foundation

When Google acquired Instantiations in August 2010, everyone knew about our Java Eclipse products. Shortly after we joined, we talked about how best to help developers now that we are part of Google. We have always wanted to get these tools in more developers’ hands. So, back in September we decided to give them away for free! The community response has been fantastic. With that done, we asked ourselves, how could we make a good thing even better? How about by open sourcing the code and creating two new Eclipse projects!

Today we are announcing Google’s donation of the source code and IP for two of these products to the open source community through the Eclipse Foundation. This donation includes WindowBuilder, the leading Eclipse Java GUI Designer, and CodePro Profiler, which identifies Java code performance issues. Specifically, the WindowBuilder Engine and designers for SWT and Swing. All in all, this is a value of more than $5 million dollars worth of code and IP.

The Eclipse Foundation’s Executive Director, Mike Milinkovich, states that, “this is clearly a significant new project announcement, and very good news for Java developers using Eclipse. It has been impressive to see the continued growth and popularity of WindowBuilder, as this product has always filled a much needed gap in the Eclipse offerings. We look forward to it appearing in an Eclipse release soon. We’re very pleased with Google’s generous support of Eclipse, and the Java developer community around the world.”

One of the exciting aspects of innovating in the open source arena is that customers benefit from a full community. We are very excited to see the diverse collection of companies and individuals that have already expressed an interest in contributing to these projects. Commercial level support is important to many customers. Genuitec, makers of MyEclipse, intends to offer commercial support for the various WindowBuilder based products including the SWT, Swing Designer and even the GWT Designer from Google. Please sign up on the Genuitec site for more information. Similarly, OnPositive intends to offer commercial support for CodePro Profiler, as well as lead as the committers on the Eclipse Community Project. Sign up on the OnPositive site for more information.

"Genuitec is pleased to offer commercial support for WindowBuilder-based products - Swing, SWT and GWT - in early 2011 for companies who wish to continue a paid support contract once their Google support expires. We've been involved with the Eclipse Foundation since the beginning, so we are very familiar with these products. Thus, providing commercial support for this product line is a natural fit for us," said Maher Masri, President of Genuitec.

“Over the years OnPositive has built up unique experience with the CodePro Profiler and we are excited to offer commercial support for it. Google’s donation ensures that Java developers can build faster applications,” said Pavel Petrochenko, President of OnPositive.

WindowBuilder
WindowBuilder is regarded as the leading GUI builder in the Java community (winning the award for Best Commercial Eclipse Tool in 2009). It includes powerful functionality for creating user interfaces based on the popular Swing, SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit), GWT (Google Web Toolkit), RCP and XWT UI frameworks.

CodePro Profiler
CodePro Profiler is an Eclipse-based Java application profiling tool that helps developers identify performance issues early in the development cycle and find CPU and algorithmic bottlenecks, memory leaks, threading issues, and other concurrency-related problems that can slow down an application or cause it to hang.

Both WindowBuilder and CodePro Profiler will become Eclipse projects in the first half of 2011. Once each one is set up as a project and available for download from the Eclipse site, the products will be accessible to use as open source code under the the standard Eclipse license. I am looking forward to leading the WindowBuilder project.

If you have any questions, you can learn more at this FAQ or we look forward to hearing from you on the forums.

By Eric Clayberg and the Google Developer Tools Team

Student Applications Open for Google Summer of Code 2010

Want to work on a cool open source project, hone your development skills with the help of a dedicated mentor, and get paid? Look no further - student applications are now open for Google Summer of Code™ 2010.

Since its inception in 2005, the Google Summer of Code program has brought together nearly 3,400 students and more than 3,000 mentors from nearly 100 countries worldwide - all for the love of code. Through the program, accepted student applicants are paired with a mentor or mentors from participating projects, thus gaining exposure to real-world software development scenarios. They also receive an opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. And best of all, more source code is created and released for the benefit of users and developers everywhere.

Full details, including pointers on how to apply, are available on the Google Open Source Blog.

By Leslie Hawthorn, Google Open Source Team

The latest addition to Google's open source projects

Did you know Google has released more than 300 open source projects to date? Yesterday, we announced the latest addition to Google's open source projects - YouTube Direct, a new tool that enables any developer to solicit video submissions, moderate and display them on their website, all powered by YouTube. We recognize the role that open source plays at Google and how it helps us create better applications and we try to give back to the community as much as possible.

YouTube Direct was built on top of YouTube's public APIs and is designed to run on Google App Engine - Google's highly scalable platform. To date, several media organizations like ABC News, The Huffington Post and Politico have taken advantage of the open platform to deploy their own version of YouTube Direct to empower citizen journalism and enrich their site in the process. We look forward to see for more creative usage of the tool.

By Amanda Surya, YouTube Direct team

Go: A New Programming Language

Have you heard about Go? We released a new, experimental systems programming language today. It is open source and we're excited about sharing it with the development community. For more information, check out the Google Open Source blog.

By Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Ian Taylor, Russ Cox, Jini Kim and Adam Langley - The Go Team

Heavy Duty: What Project Hosting Users are Doing

In July, the Project Hosting team announced the People sub-tab where project members can easily document their duties within their projects.


Here are the top ten most frequently selected project duties:

1. Lead by providing a project vision and roadmap
2. Design new features, write code and unit tests
3. Design core libraries, write code and unit tests
4. Have fun hacking and learn new stuff!
5. Test the system before each release
6. Review code changes and provide constructive feedback
7. Plan the scope of release milestones and track progress
8. Lead the UI design and incorporate feedback
9. Write end-user documentation and examples
10. Triage new issues and support requests from end-users

Those frequent duties are a testament to the serious and thoughtful software development processes often found in open source development. But, open source is not all hard work: our users also decided that it was important to document some of their more colorful duties.  Those ranged from general, "Be awesome," to vicarious, "Watch nervously as students write code," to self-effacing, "Create elaborate unit tests for small corners of the library, write hilariously malformed XML comments, and mercilessly break the build," to simply practical leadership, "Buy the pizza for everyone else."

Don't skip your duty to write your own! Just click the People sub-tab and start to document what you and your project team are supposed to be doing.

By Jason Robbins, Google Code Team

Final Results for our Fifth Google Summer of Code

We've just finished collecting final evaluations for our fifth Google Summer of Code, our flagship program to introduce college and university students to Open Source development practices. With nearly 3,000 mentor and student participants this year alone, this global initiative has brought together thousands of developers worldwide for the past five years, all for the love of code. For more details about the final results of Google Summer of Code 2009 and information on when to find the source code produced by this year's crop of students, check out the Google Open Source Blog.

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Above and Beyond the Call of Duty, with Permission

Project Hosting on Google Code is a beehive of activity, with many large and active projects and even more that aspire to that level. Now it will be a little easier for project members to sort out who should be doing what by documenting each member's duties in plain language on the new People sub-tab. Here's an example from the zscreen project:


Duties describe what each member is expected to be doing. Project owners can grant permissions that control what each member is allowed to do. While permissions can be fairly fine-grained, it's usually best to grant broad permissions, and then trust your project members to do their duties or go above and beyond them when the situation calls for it.

In open source software development, anyone can access the source code of the project, and it's important to allow anyone to access issues and project documentation. But in some projects, there is a need to restrict some information to a subset of project members for a limited time. For example, you might want to quickly patch a security hole before publicizing the details of how to exploit it. Project members can now place restrictions on individual issues to control who can view, update, or comment on them.
Here's some of what our new permission system allows project owners to do when they need to:

• Acknowledge the role of a contributing user without giving them any additional permissions
• Trust a contributor to update issues or wiki pages without letting them modify source code
• Restrict access to specific issues to just committers, or to a specific subset of members
• Restrict comments on specific issues or wiki pages when another feedback channel should be used instead
• Automatically set access restrictions based on issue labels

Getting started is easy, just click the People sub-tab and start to document what you and your project team are supposed to be doing. If you need to mess with permissions, see our permission system documentation for all the details.

If you'd like to meet some of the people behind Google Code, please drop by the Google booth at OSCON 2009 this week.

By Jason Robins, Project Hosting on Google Code Team

Apollo 11 mission's 40th Anniversary: One large step for open source code...

On this day 40 years ago, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the Moon. This was quite an achievement for mankind and a key milestone in world history.

To commemorate this event the Command Module code (Comanche054) and Lunar Module code (Luminary099) have been transcribed from scanned images to run on yaAGC (an open source AGC emulator) by the Virtual AGC and AGS project.

For more information on this project, I recommend looking at the website and the open source project.

Here are a few links to the source code:

• http://code.google.com/p/virtualagc/source/browse/trunk/Comanche055/CM_BODY_ATTITUDE.s?r=258
• http://code.google.com/p/virtualagc/source/browse/trunk/Luminary099/LUNAR_LANDING_GUIDANCE_EQUATIONS.s?r=258
• http://code.google.com/p/virtualagc/source/browse/trunk/FP8/FP8.s?r=258

As the project evolves, look for syntax highlighting done with a special extension for google-code-prettify.

Image - NASA/courtesy of nasaimages.org

By Nathaniel Manista, Project Hosting on Google Code

Google I/O Interactive Map: Now with videos + some Open Source goodness!

If you attended Google I/O 2009 a few weeks ago, you may have noticed a kiosk station on the 2nd and 3rd floors of Moscone West labelled 'Interactive Conference Map, powered by Google Maps'. The kiosk simply pointed to a JavaScript Maps API-based interactive map of the venue I created in my 20% time.

Now that all the I/O session videos and presentations are live, we took the opportunity to mash up the videos with our interactive conference map to provide developers with an alternate way to navigate through 80+ keynote and session videos, and bring the action at I/O to life virtually. For example, here are videos of sessions that took place in Room 1 (click the tabs for Wednesday and Thursday sessions). And here's where the keynote sessions took place. Check out where we filmed interviews with I/O sandbox developers on their apps, technical challenges and business best practices.


Now, hopefully you enjoyed using the map and are now thinking, "Cool, I want to do something like this for my next event!" (or your college campus, or such). If you are, then good news everyone, I've open sourced the interactive conference map and all relevant resources. Inside the project, you'll also find a how to article outlining the steps I went through to create the map.

If you attended I/O, then I hope you enjoyed it and had time to stop by the conference map kiosk! If not, no worries, just make sure to check out the open source project and see if you can use the code and/or techniques in your next mapping project!

By Roman Nurik, Developer Programs Engineer

Mercurial Now Available to All Open Source Projects

About a month ago we announced Mercurial support for early testers. Today, we are happy to announce that all Project Hosting users can create a new Mercurial project and convert their existing projects from Subversion to Mercurial. 

We also want to thank the projects that helped us test support for Mercurial. Projects like Clojure-Dev and Spice of Creation helped us discover new usage patterns and fix several unforeseen issues. Unlike our mature Subversion implementation, there are still a few issues/features that we are working on. 

We therefore encourage everyone to be familiar with what is supported before picking Mercurial.

Please let us know if you have any feedback or find any issues. If you're coming to Google I/O, be sure to come meet us in person and hear our talk about Mercurial on Bigtable this Thursday at 3:45pm-4:45pm in Moscone West - Room 5. We have Mercurial SWAG!

By Ali Pasha, Google Code Team

Mercurial support for Project Hosting on Google Code

We are happy to announce that Project Hosting on Google Code now supports the Mercurial version control system in addition to Subversion. This is being initially rolled out as a preview release to a few invited users on a per-project basis, so that we can iron out the kinks before making this available to the general public.


Mercurial, like Git and Bazaar, is a distributed version control system (DVCS) that enables developers to work offline and define more complex workflows such as peer-to-peer pushing/pulling of code. It also makes it easier for outside contributors to contribute to projects, as cloning and merging of remote repositories is really easy.

While there were several DVCSs that we could support, our decision to support Mercurial was based on two key reasons. The primary reason was to support our large base of existing Subversion users that want to use a distributed version control system. For these users we felt that Mercurial had the lowest barrier to adoption because of its similar command set, great documentation (including a great online book), and excellent tools such as Tortoise Hg. Second, given that Google Code's infrastructure is built for HTTP-based services, we found that Mercurial had the best protocol and performance characteristics for HTTP support. For more information, see our analysis.

If you would like to help us launch Mercurial and to try out the features as an invited user, please fill out the following form. We are currently looking for active projects with more than two users that are willing to try out Mercurial and work with us to identify issues and resolve them. For projects that plan on migrating from Subversion, see our conversion docs for the steps required for this process.

Our implementation of Mercurial is built on top of Bigtable, making it extremely scalable and reliable just like our Subversion on Bigtable implementation. For more information on our Mercurial implementation, we will have a TechTalk at Google IO that will be led by Jacob Lee, one of the core engineers working on Mercurial support. Let us know if you plan on attending and we'll give you access to Mercurial ahead of the talk.

By David Baum, Software Engineer

Improvements to Google Checkout Module for osCommerce

At Google Checkout, we're constantly striving to improve our usability. That's why we've recently simplified and improved the installation and configuration process for the osCommerce Google Checkout module. osCommerce is a popular open-source e-commerce solution and the module is an open-source project hosted on code.google.com.

We've completely reworked the installation process by no longer requiring users to manually copy and paste large swaths of PHP code into their files. Instead, we've created an automated deployment app (shown below) that does this for you. This should ease concerns about lines of PHP getting copied into the wrong place. If you want to learn more about the installation process, you can take a look at our documentation, which contains a step-by-step walkthrough with screenshots showing exactly how it works.


For more details, check out our post on the Checkout blog. We're excited about the improvements to the osCommerce Checkout module. If you're using osCommerce, we invite you to give Checkout a try and share your feedback with us.

By Ed Davisson, Google Checkout Team

Code Conversations Episode 1 - Chris DiBona on Google's Open Source Programs

By Neel Kshetramade, Google Developer Programs

"Code Conversations" is a new series of videos intended to film casual conversations with notable Google developers and legends in the technology field. No agenda, no topic... just thoughts. This video is the first episode of this series, in which Chris DiBona, our intrepid open source programs manager talks to Stephanie Liu of the Developer Team about his "sweet goatee" in the Chrome Comic. He also explains why Google open sourced Chrome and Android and why we didn't do it sooner. He also touches on why much of Google's software isn't open sourced.

Intros:

Chris DiBona is the open source programs manager at Google, where his team oversees license compliance and supports the open source developer community through the release of open source software projects and programs such as the Google Summer of Code. Before joining Google, Chris was an editor at Slashdot, has edited the books Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution and Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution and formerly co-hosted the FLOSS weekly with Leo Laporte. His personal blog is called Ego Food.

Stephanie Liu is a Programs Manager on the Developer Team here at Google.



We'll be checking your comments on this post for feedback and ideas for future Code Conversations.

Staying up to date with Google Code

By Ali Pasha & Jacob Moon, Google Code

As the number of developers and projects have grown on Google Code, we've started thinking about how to get projects to learn from and work with each other. Today, we're happy to announce that we have made a few steps towards that goal.

First, we've added user update streams to make it easy to see what a particular user has been doing across Project hosting on Google Code. As an example, take a look at Ben Collins-Sussman's activities on his profile page. Ben works on Google Code, but it's obvious that he has other interests as well.

In addition, tracking open source projects and other developers is as easy as starring a project or a developer profile. Starring a project or developer adds a link in your new "Starred Projects" and "Starred Developers" section of your profile page, making it really easy to find those projects or developers again. Starred projects are also added to the new "My projects" drop-down, which makes it easy to navigate to a project from anywhere on the site.

Once a project or a developer is starred, all updates from starred projects and developers can be tracked by looking at your personalized updates.

For those that prefer to use their feed reader, use the following new feeds:

• Updates for a user - http://code.google.com/feeds/u/{username}/updates/user/basic
• Developers a user is tracking - http://code.google.com/feeds/u/{username}/updates/projects/basic
• Projects a user is tracking - http://code.google.com/feeds/u/{username}/updates/developers/basic

As always, we look forward to your feedback.

New! Caption files for Google Developer Videos

by Naomi Bilodeau, Google Code Team

Last year, YouTube launched a Captions and Subtitles feature. In addition to launching a new playlist for captioned Developer Videos, we're also kicking off an Open Source project to host caption files that anyone can reuse under the terms of the Creative Commons 3.0 BY license.

We're hoping that developers will come up with interesting uses for caption data, once it's in the public domain. You can use transcripts as a corpus for training speech-to-text algorithms or testing applications that read and write caption files. Or, combine timepoint data with YouTube's URL support to jump to a specific point in a video.

Caption tracks make YouTube videos accessible to a wider audience. For example, try a search on [RESTful protocol YouTube] and you'll find search results from the captions on Joe Gregorio's recent talk.

While we're delighted that Kevin Marks' captioned English accent can be more easily understood by Americans, we've also translated the caption files and provided tracks in multiple languages for a few of our captioned videos. For all other videos, YouTube can perform Auto-Translate on caption text using Google Translate technology.



To learn more about YouTube caption file formats, take a look at the YouTube Help Center. If you're interested in contributing caption files for videos on Google channels, or making translations available, please consider joining the project.

We hope you'll find these additions useful. Happy reading!

Happy holidays from Google Code!

By Matt Hansen, Google Developer Programs

At Google Code, we are getting into the holiday spirit early. To thank open source developers for their support, I'm happy to announce that we are giving every project on Google Code a whole lot more quota!

We're increasing the maximum file sizes from 20MB to 40MB, Subversion quotas from 100MB to 1GB, and download quotas from 100MB to 2GB.

Happy holidays!

P.S. If you need more space, let us know!

Increased code search coverage, now with Git and Mercurial support

By Ali Pasha, Google Code Search

At Google Code search, we've seen distributed version control systems get more popular. Linux has been using one for several years and several large open source projects have migrated to using one in the last few years. In recognition of that, we are now announcing that we crawl Git and Mercurial repositories.

For Git, we now crawl repositories hosted by several public git hosting sites including GitHub and repo.or.cz. In addition to that, we also crawl Android, Chromium and Linux code.

• Github.com: ruby package:github.com
• Android: AbsListView package:android
• Linux: FD_CLR package:/git.kernel.org
• Chromium: MessageLoop package:chromium.org
  

For Mercurial repositories, we now crawl most popular open source repositories including Mozilla, JDK, and NetBeans.

• Mozilla: class:nsCOMArrayEnumerator package:hg.mozilla.org
• JDK: java.util.concurrent package:hg.openjdk.java.net
• NetBeans: javax.swing.JFrame package:netbeans.org
  

Finally, we have also extended coverage to support Codeplex: System.ServiceModel package:codeplex.com

Feel free to provide feedback to let us know how we're doing.