Joomla! Joomla! Las Vegas!!!

Leslie Hawthorn of the Open Source Programs team is heading to the bright lights of Las Vegas to speak at Joomla! Day Las Vegas coming up April 3rd through April 5th, 2009. If you are interested in Joomla!, haven't had a chance to hear LH speak before, or just want to hang out with some past Google Summer of Code participants, don't miss it.

Hope to see you there.

By Cat Allman, Open Source Team

POP and IMAP Troubleshooter

The POP and IMAP Troubleshooter is a wizard-like application that people can use to diagnose and repair problems when connecting to email service providers. It reads the configuration files of several email clients, checks them for appropriate settings, and then attempts to create a connection to the provider's servers. You can compile a generic version that allows you to connect to arbitrary servers, or a provider-specific version that can check additional constraints, such as the correct IMAP server name. Google's own binary is available from our Gmail support pages. The troubleshooter is written in C++ using Qt, and can be built for Linux, Windows, and the Mac. 

We welcome your feedback. Check out the code and join our discussion group. Happy hacking!

By Gunnar Ritter, Site Reliability Engineering Team

Reminder: Applications for Google Summer of Code™ 2009 Due Friday

We're entering the home stretch for the student application period for Google Summer of Code 2009!  With 150 Free and Open Source software projects acting as mentoring organizations this year, we have a little bit of something for everyone. Students have until Friday at 19:00 UTC to submit proposals to work on a three month coding project with a mentor from academia or industry.

If you're searching for inspiration or a bit more information while you talk about your ideas with your would-be mentors, you may be interested in the latest installment of the Code Conversations series from the Google Code Blog. We share some past success stories, tips for student applicants and a bit more about Melange, the software that powers the Google Summer of Code 2009 site. 




Ready to apply now? Take a look at our Frequently Asked Questions page and get ready to submit your proposal. As always, helpful and knowledgeable folks are hanging around in #gsoc on Freenode to answer your questions, or you can subscribe to the program discussion list for news and updates. 

Remember, all applications are due by 19:00 UTC this Friday, April 3rd. Best of luck to all our applicants!

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Nixysa: Scriptable Plugins for Browsers

Nixysa is a new tool for developers who want to create scriptable plug-ins for NPAPI-supporting browsers such as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. Currently, exposing significant APIs via JavaScript is a tedious and repetitive process, but Nixysa lets you declare your API with a simple Interface Description Language. It also generates all the glue code that is needed to script your classes directly from the browser. If you want to add fancy features to web browsers, you can focus on the code that enables cool functionality instead of the boilerplate glue. As a bonus, Nixysa also works with Native Client which makes it easier to create NPAPI modules, providing a secure way of running native code in the browser.

We welcome your feedback. Check out the source code and take our sample code for a test drive. We look forward to hearing from you on our project discussion list.

By Antoine Labour, Client Software Engineering Team

DrupalCon DC

Dmitri Gaskin speaking at DrupalCon DC, photo by kcolwell

Hello World! I'm Dmitri Gaskin, I'm 13 years old, and a Drupal Developer. I was a mentor for the Google Highly Open Participation™ Contest in late 2007 (I was too young to actually participate in the contest, having just turned 12), a mentor for Google Summer of Code™ in 2008 , and will return to mentor Google Summer of Code in 2009.

Drupal is a Content Management System with an awesome community behind it. I've been a member of the Drupal community for a bit over 3 years. I've written patches for Drupal core (what you get when you get when you download "Drupal") and for many modules (Drupalspeak for "add-ons"). I've built some small sites with Drupal, but I usually contribute back more that I actually use it and that's fine by me - with such an amazing community, contributing is fun.

Earlier this month, Google's Open Source team sponsored my attendance at DrupalCon DC. DrupalCon is Drupal's official twice-yearly conference. This year was amazing! With over 1400 people and over 100 sessions, it was the largest DrupalCon ever. I presented a session on jQuery and co-presented sessions on Installation Profiles and the Intro to SimpleTest. Probably the best part of the conference for me was meeting so many people in person who I had only known over IRC or in Drupal's Issue Queues.

I attended sessions on a variety of subjects, including API building, semantic web, and usability testing, among other things. I even managed to squeeze some time in to practice the piano at the University of D.C. One theme I noticed during the conference (however I was one of the first to talk about it at the conference so it may be partially my fault) was how to improve the install system of Drupal. The current system is less than ideal, so we tried to think of ways to fix it (Hint: it's not easy and we still aren't 100% sure of what the best solution is).

Overall, DrupalCon DC was a lot of fun and I'll do all I can to attend the next DrupalCon (although the dates conflict with school and I'll be going to a new school next year). I am really grateful to Google for helping to make it possible for me to attend.

By Dmitri Gaskin, Drupal Developer