The Meme Keeps Spreading: Finnish Summer Code

Sanna Heiskanen, Project Manager - Finnish Summer Code

The Finnish Summer Code 2007 project employed five university students for the summer. Google's Open Source Team was one of the sponsors of the students' projects. The Finnish Summer Code is organised by COSS (The Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions) and aims to help Finnish students participate in open source development.

Here is a quick run-down of the coders and their projects:

Janne Kalliomäki - KBackup

KBackup is a fresh project started by Janne himself to act as a Qt4-based front-end to the command line-interfaced backup-manager software. The software includes a wizard mode for creating an original configuration file and a tab based interface to edit existing one. A cron scheduling connection is also used.

Niko Kiirala - Inkscape

Niko Kiirala worked on the most advanced open source scalable vector graphics software, Inkscape's graphical filters, including feBlend-, feOffset, feTurbulence and feComposite, to name but a few. He also worked on rewriting the filter rendering engine and mentored two new Inkscape coders.

Ville Lindholm - Exaile

Ville Lindholm got to grips with Exaile, a python/GTK2 based audio player. His accomplishments include adding support for connecting to two new CD burning software and improvements and the addition of both CD ripping and audio file tag editing. As a final touch Ville improved Exaile's loading times with large audio libraries.

Tomi Rikkola - JBoss Rules

Toni Rikkola worked on JBoss Drules: a part of JBoss used to separate business logic from infrastructure and presentation logic and on Rules Analytic Mode, which is a tool made for the people who write the rules. Improving Drools involved improving the model for testing rules and test output, and unit testing of the rules themselves, but also incorporated the metadata model.

Ville-Pekka Vainio - MoinMoin

MoinMoin is a Python based wiki software. Man and info are used by multiple Unix-based software projects as the end-user documentation format. For open source projects easy editing of documentation is vital, and wiki techniques make the process faster and more transparent. Ville-Pekka's project concentrated on importing DocBook XML format to MoinMoin wiki format, implementing sisterdiff and getting documentation from version control system and RPM software packages.

You can learn more about last year's projects from Paul Sladen's article at LWN.net.

The Finnish Summer Code is back again this summer, and Finnish students are welcome to apply now for 2008!