Compound Thinking

Google Summer of Code meets TurboGears

The TurboGears community is proud to welcome the participation of six Google Summer of Code participants. These students have proposed very interesting projects, done a lot of research, and promise to make TurboGears and related projects better.

The goal of the Google Summer of Code project is to get students more involved in the Open Source community, and I’m very excited about getting to know this group of students better, and seeing them show their stuff. And of course I’m looking forward to all the things they promise to do, from building automated build and test systems, to creating a super-easy CRUD interface builder, and improving the performance of Genshi templates.

We also had a large number of student proposals which weren’t accepted for the GSoC project, some of which were very, very good. The competition was very tough this year, and I am hopeful that some of those students will get involved in the TurboGears community anyway.

• DBSprockets User Interface by Alberto Valverde González
• Documentation Production System by Bruno José de Moreaes Melo
• Genshi optimization & XPath rewrite by Marcin Kurczych
• ToscaWidgets Library for OpenLayers and jQuery by Sanjiv Singh
• Improving TurboGears2 support on Jython by Ariane Paola Gomes
• TurboGears Quality Assurance Initiative by Steven Mohr

As you can see the majority of these projects are about improving stuff that’s used in TurboGears, but are generally useful tools on their own. We’re committed to principle of re-usable components, and the GSoC proposals we received have shown that there are a lot of other people commited to that same approach.

I’m particularly interested in Stephen Mohr’s project, because I think having a reliable build and test system available so that we can easily determine if a change in one of our dependencies breaks things is critical in for a world of interconnected but independent components to be viable.

But most of all I’m very excited that Google chose us to participate and that we had such a great set of proposals to choose from. Thanks Google! and thanks everybody who wrote a proposal.