SoC 2007

As I mentioned in the project proposal, I expect to complete the project before end of July. To keep up with the speed, initial code of 2nd part was released. It is still under development thus may not be stable.

What I have done?

I had my last exam yesterday, which is why you didn't hear from me since the last write-up from nearly a week ago. One more assignment is likely to keep me busy until Monday, but when that's done I can fully focus on my SoC project. That is, apart from the week-long interruption by the KDE conference where I head to on next week's Friday.

Oh boy, I wish I could borrow just a fraction of the time that I have in July and August, and use it before the mid-term deadline x-)

This past week I did some work looking into a bug in simpletest that was holding it back from a 5.0 release. Since a lot of my current work is being done against simpletest a 5.0 release will make it a lot simpler for me to do my work. It looks like there could be some bugs in the simpletest browser with regards to cookie and session handling.

Short report about what's going on with the taxonomy manager. Last week my exams at university started (until end of June), so not much coding yet.

Very short update for this week. I'm trying to finish the parts of my client needed for sending and receiving messages. Next week I plan to start working on the Drupal module and API. Hopefully by the first or second week of July I'll be able to put something on my development site to demo the publish-subscribe functionality using an external server. Should be just in time for mid-term evaluations :)

That's all for now.
-Max

During the past couple of weeks I've been working with my mentors Steven, Theodore and Mark on setting the requirements for the new core theme, and a design direction. We're veering towards a highly customizable theme that has plenty of content blocks, with added styling flexibility like in Garland. The wireframes have been done, and I'll publish a cleaned-up version here soon.

I found Kannel, an open source WAP/SMS Gateway that runs on Linux. According to their project's website, it is possible to run Kannel on a machine with a GSM mobile phone connected to it and have yourself an SMS gateway. I will definitely take a close look at this project. I'm going to try to get it running this weekend. If I can, writing a driver for this system makes a lot of sense. It will make SMS more accessible to smaller organizations.

So, Mercurial, or "hg" in short. One of the two revision control systems originally written for being the Linux kernel's BitKeeper replacement - in the end, git was chosen for that job, but Mercurial lived on nevertheless. The requirement of being suitable for kernel development implied two features: performance (although git is still a tiny bit faster) and distributed development methodologies. Both are also present in git, and in fact, the two systems are very similar in scope, paradigms and usage patterns.

While git is written in pure C, Mercurial mostly consists of Python code, with only small, critical code paths implemented in C. This has benefits for Mercurial's portability, as can even be observed with other SoC students. git is pretty much focused on just Linux, whereas Mercurial can also be installed more easily on Windows and other Unixes. Not that straightforward graphical tools are yet as mature as the ones that exist for CVS or SVN.

So one part of my Google Summer of Code project is coming along nicely. Although I have posted a summary to my mentors recently, and we started to discuss some issues, they seem to be overwhelmed with work, so maybe opening up and widening the discussion is appropriate here. I had a hard time deciding whether post here or on the relevant issue (http://drupal.org/node/105986 is connected to the topic at hand), but I figured I will post a note there to this post, as this gets too long and looks into lots of directions to fit into that issue (not to make that issue a monster discussion).