After a period of careful consideration and planning, a new edition of the Zurich Open Source Jam took place on May 27th. This time, the focus was more on the social side of the Jam, but an Open Source Jam always includes a number of presentations so our guests have topics to debate.
William Candillion started the meeting with his lightning talk about cloud extensions for XQuery. His project has built a large set of tools to work with XQuery++ in a variety of APIs from a number of programming languages.
Yannick Stucki explained the design of his Android music player Music Queue. For example this player displays the current song playlist in various ways, rather than details about the current song, and provides novel ways to alter it with simple swipes, making it easier to use while walking.
Following Yannick, Cedric Staub told us about the modular UZBL browser (pronounced as “usable”). This browser follows the UNIX philosophy by consisting of a number of single-tasked components and scripts which interact with each other to display the web site and offer controls.
After a break to grab some food and drinks, Petr Pridal talked about his Google Sites Backup and Mirroring scripts. These scripts use the Google Sites API to dump and restore web sites from Google Sites, including the version history of each site.
If you missed this Open Source Jam, don’t worry; there will soon be another one here in Zurich. If you have an interesting open source project you’re working on, or if you would like to participate in one, you’re very welcome to show up and get in contact with other people who share your interests!
Stay tuned and watch for announcements on the Open Source Jam Zurich Google Group!
By André Wienck, Site Reliability Engineering Team
