New Functionality for Moodle

By Cristin Frodella, Google Apps for Education Team

We're always excited to jump into the world of education and when it helps Open Source, we're all the happier. Moodlerooms, a partner of Moodle, the Open Source learning management system, recently approached to fund a project which would allow Moodle users to easily integrate Google Apps Education Edition, our communication and collaboration suite. Our Open Source Programs Office sponsored the work and the result is an Open Source single sign-on integration between Moodle and Google. The best part is the extensibility features allow any educational software vendor to take a similar approach to provide user directory synchronization, single sign-on, and user data integration. Check out the full story on the Google Enterprise Blog.

W3C Forms Working Group Convenes at the Googleplex

Post by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist


I have been a member of the W3C Forms Working Group since its inception in early 2000, and it gave me great pleasure to be able to host the group's recent three day face to face meeting on the Google campus February 9th - 11th. This Working Group develops an XML vocabulary that is used for creating forms-based Web interaction. During our meeting, the group spent its time finishing up the test suite for its current suite of specifications. A significant portion of the meeting was devoted to designing the necessary APIs for implementing the Forms technology within current-day browsers via pluggable JavaScript. Implementing the Forms technology in a cross-browser fashion using open JavaScript libraries holds the promise of delivering cross-browser, cross-platform Web interaction that is authored almost exclusively via declarative markup, which helps authors create Web interaction without having to program. In addition to myself , meeting participants included:

• John Boyer, Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM and current chair of the W3C Forms Working Group
• Erik Bruchez, developer of Orbeon Forms , an XForms-based open source forms solution
• Leigh Klotz, software architect for Xerox Corporation
• Ulrich Nicolas Lissé, XML Technologist and Standards Architect at DreamLab Technologies
• Steven Pemberton, from CWI, an institute for research in mathematics and computer science
• Nick Van den Bleeken, Research & Development Manager at Inventive Designers, a document and intelligent eForms automation solutions provider
• Charlie Wiecha, Manager of Multichannel Web Interaction at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

A breakdown of the agenda is available.

Zurich Open Source Jam 6

By René Nussbaumer, Systems Administration Team

We started the evening slowly, and by around 18:30 almost everyone had arrived to enjoy the food and beer. Thirty-three guests from all over Switzerland and surrounding countries were there, and we even had one visitor from Canada.

After everybody enjoyed the first round of food, Gürkan Sengün started with the first lightning talk about hugin, a software package used to create panorama photos. Hugin creates panorama photos by wrapping around other scripts, such as finding common points in two images and putting the images together. Gürkan did a live demo of the software by going through all the steps to create a panorama photo of the audience.

The next speaker, Lukas Renggli, gave us an introduction into seaside. Seaside is a web application framework designed to make web applications easy to write and maintain. Applications are written using the component design pattern and can again be composed to build larger applications. Should any problems arise, you have the possibility of live debugging and live fixing of the code without loosing state. As a demo, Lukas showed us a simple application which calculated the reciprocal of an integer, all of which you could change through interactive links.




The next round of talks was started by Michael Schwarz, who is working on leanXcam. leanXcam is a small Open Source camera running uClinux that not only takes photos but is also able to process them on the device. After a quick introduction Michael gave us a demo how the camera works.

The last talk was about JExample by Adrian Kuhn. JExample is an extension for JUnit, a testing framework for Java, and fully compatible with it. JExample provides unit test dependencies to make debugging unit tests easier, providing graphs where you can see which components failed without running the actual tests. Adrian illustrated this functionality by testing a defective stack implementation.

It was a really interesting evening and everyone attending enjoyed it immensely. Thanks to everyone and hopefully we'll see you soon again. To stay informed about future Open Source Jams in Zurich, please join the Open Source Jam Zurich Google Group.

OpenStreetMap's New API Database Server

By Ellen Ko, Open Source Team

A few weeks ago Mano Marks, a Geo Developer Advocate here at Google, informed the Open Source Programs Office of OpenStreetMap's server upgrade fundraiser. Recognizing the good work that OpenStreetMap does by providing free geographic data of the world, we were happy to respond. We donated 5,000 GBP to the cause, and along with contributions from around the world, OpenStreetMap exceeded their goal in a single week! Congratulations to OpenStreetMap for building such an active and devoted community.

If you are interested in a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world, we encourage you to check out their site and see what all the excitement is about.

Software Construction Toolkit Released

By Randall Spangler, Software Engineer - Client Tools Team

If you've ever worked on a cross-platform software project, you know how often changes made on one platform break the build on other platforms. If you're using native project files (Xcode on Mac, makefiles on Linux, etc.), every developer needs access to every platform just to add a single source file. You can use a single makefile shared between all the platforms, but writing a makefile which "Does The Right Thing" on each platform is tricky. On all platforms, you need simple ways to express dependencies, run unit tests, and rebuild individual project components. You need to be able to extend the build tool to cover the 5% of your project that doesn't fit the usual build patterns. Oh, and the tool should be documented, tested, and free of charge.

To meet those challenges, we've written a cross-platform Software Construction Toolkit, built on the Open Source SCons build tool. It's written in Python, and builds on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

In addition to contributing fixes and enhancements back to SCons itself, we've released full source and documentation for the toolkit.

We always look forward to your feedback, so check out the code or an example project and send us your comments in our discussion group.