Welcome to SummerTalk 2008. This program is here to help students work on open-source Smalltalk projects. The European Smalltalk User Group (http://www.esug.org/) will fund some students during the summer.
Each student (in sync with his supporting organization and project leader) will receive 2500 euros. Each student will work under the guidance of a mentor accredited by ESUG. The money will be distributed in 2 steps: middle and end of the project.
The code developed during this program has to be released under the MIT Licence. Previous year
We are looking for new projects. Please send us your idea at stephane.ducasse@iam.unibe.ch and Serge.Stinckwich@info.unicaen.fr.
ESUG will fund up to five projects. So in total we have 6 projects. If you are a company you can also sponsor this action.
The goal is to enhance the new compiler.
Student: Jannick Menanteau.
This project is about creating a minimal UI in Squeak suitable for embedded systems, kiosks, mobile phone platforms such as "Android" and internet devices such as Nokia N810 and Chumby. Many complex looking UI functions can be developed using a minimal set of tools and some simple code using Squeak. This UI only requires basic Squeak graphics and text support and doesn't use MVC or Morphic. The code can be harvested from a project that was done 8 years ago for an 8MB PDA handheld device and refined to be published to be used in open source projects. An early draft of the code was ised in a system that can be seen at: http://www.squeakonline.com/downloads/cedemo.zip. The system also lends itself to code generation and the project will address this part also.
OpenDBX is an extremely lightweight but yet extensible database access library written in C. It provides an abstraction layer to all supported databases with a single, clean and simple interface that leads to an elegant code design automatically. This is an excellent option to make an application support different databases with little effort and in a very efficient way.
The project plan has been split into two phases:
First phase: OpenDBX squeak plugin
This is the phase I consider to be reachable during Google Summer of Code.
During this phase, the squeak plugin for OpenDBX, which will be like an OpenDBX wrapper, will be developed.
The intention is to make this abstraction the more object oriented possible. This wrapper will allow objects to send messages which will represent data base operations. The wrapper will then, of course, talk to the OpenDBX library. To make this possible, the Squeak Foreign Function Interface (http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/1414) will be used.
FFI is used to call functions located in shared libraries which are not part of the Squeak VM nor its plugins.
After finishing this first part of the project, a truly object oriented access to mayor RDBMS will be obtained.
Second phase: GLORP driver:
I believe, getting this feature completed within the GSoC dates, will be a little difficult. However, I will, for sure, do it as soon as I finish with the first phase.
GLORP (http://www.glorp.org/) is an open-source object-relational mapping layer for Smalltalk.
As the dirver for postgreSQL works very well with GLORP, I will inspect it and try to reproduce a similar driver architecture for the first phase result.
As a result of this feature, people will be able to use an ORM (GLORP in this case) with a generic driver that cantalk to almost all RDBMS.
students: Mariano Martinez Peck
We will proceed the following way:
The projects should be distributed with an open-source license fitting the project: MIT/Squeak-L, BSD, APSL 20....
Note that we encourage students and mentors to advertize that they have been selected for a SummerTalk and make public their progress.
Some quality points:
The selection process done by ESUG will take into account whether the student will be supervised, if there is an infrastructure to help him as well as a the relevance of the topic for the community and the trust in the mentor.