Tcl and the Google Summer of Code

Matthew M. Burke

BlueDino Software

What is the Google Summer of Code?

Google pays for students to contribute to open source projects.

• Roughly 150 organizations
• 1125 Students; 83% successfully completed project
• $5000/student; $4500 to student, $500 to mentor (usually)
• All Tcl mentors are donating their stipend to the Tcl Association
• Projects are both proposed by mentors and by (potential) students
• Organization ranks proposals; Google indicates how many proposals they will fund. This number is based (loosely) on how many proposals an organization receives.

What got funded.

http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code-2008-tcl/

• Loading shared libraries from memory; Daniel Hans/Andreas Kupries
• Tcl FUSE; Alexandros Stergiakis
• TclDTrace; Remigiusz Modrzejewski; Daniel A. Steffen
• Audio input and output library and extension; Mohammed Abderraouf Bencheralet/Youness El Alaoui
• Tcl/Tk printing support; Blicharski Krzysztof/Clif Flynt

What got funded (cont).

• Update Tk test system project; Ania Pawelczyk/Jeffrey Hobbs
• Graph manipulations; Alejandro Eduardo Cruz Paz/Steve Landers
• A business rule management system based on the high-level object oriented scripting language XOTcl; Franz Wirl/Gustaf Neumann
• AOLserver-GD integration; Matthew Gagen/Matthew Burke

What didn't get funded.

• Full Tcl bindings for Windows DDE library
• Improved core support for HTTP/1.1
• Tcl/Tk: Printing Support
• Development of an integrated, standard-compliant authoring tool for .LRN
• Tcl Database Connectivity (TIP#308) for MySQL ana/or SQLite

What didn't get funded (cont).

• OpenACS/.LRN international standards integration
• Tcl/Tk browser plugin: User-privileged security
• Graph manipulations
• Tcl FUSE

Why so many slots?

• Tcl originally allocated 4, ended up with 9
• KDE: 47; ASF: 30; FreeBSD: 20; Php: 10; Tex: 3; Subversion: 2; Ruby: 9; LLvm: 3; Adium: 4
• (Successfully) argued that we were an "umbrella" application (AOLserver, OpenACS, XOTcl, Tcl, Tk, aMSN)

What went well.

• All of our students finished.
• Most of the projects delivered high-quality code.
• Most of the students have expressed an interest in continuing to participate in Tcl community.

What didn't go well.

• Little participation by students in public fora.
• Some problems with mentor/mentee communication.
• Didn't get invited to Mentor Summit (my fault).

For next year.

• More potential projects. More projects geared towards beginners
• Each project should have at least two mentors
• Organization Admin doesn't mentor
• More pressure to get students to post
• Make better use of time between student acceptance and when they are supposed to start work (~5 weeks)—Tcl boot camp, have lots of community members talk with them, ...