Officially a DocBook Mentor for Google Summer of Code 2012

I have got the opportunity to be a mentor for DocBook organization under Google Summer of Code 2012. I was a former participant of Google Summer of Code 2010, and 2011. In 2010 I worked with DocBook as a student with my mentor David Cramer where I developed the DocBook WebHelp output format. I always fascinated contributing to an Open-Source project, so it was a big achievement for me. I kept contributing to it which made me a part of the community, and a Committer for the project.

As many of you probably know, Google Summer of Code is an annual program administered by Google, in which Google sponsor students to complete a free and open-source software coding project. This is eighth iteration of GSoC. Most of the giants in Open-Source has been part of it including GNU, Gentoo, Apache, KDE, Ubuntu, Mozilla with student participants from all over the world.

DocBook has secured five slots this time. We had enough resources to mentor five slots, on top of that there were five good proposals to mentor for. Fortunately, there wasn't any issue with de-duplication or from anything for that matter, so all five were selected into DocBook. This time, as usual, Richard, and Stefan Seefeld are the org admins. Stefan Seefeld, David, Jirka, Steve, and me are primary mentors for the five students while Stefan Hinz, and Peter Desjardins will be co-mentors for the two selected webhelp proposals.
Yes, two proposals were for WebHelp. That made this year's program more exciting. The two students were, Visitha, from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka (my Alma Mater), and Arun, from PES Institute of Technology Bangalore, India. There were overlap between them, so we had to sorted those out first before selecting both.

I found Visitha during the Google Summer of Code meetup at University of Moratwa we, past Sri Lankan gsocers, organized. Buddhi, who also attended that meetup has selected into DocBook. It's so glad to hear that people appreciating the effort we put there, and that it actually meant a lot for most.

I must mention Gihan Chanuka here. He contacted me on last January where he wanted to contribute to DocBook outside of GSoC. He has been asking various questions he had while trying out DocBook. Though he wasn't able to do that, he was a good candidate for GSoC. I am delighted that he also got selected into flying colors. Of course there is a long way to go from selecting to completion, but when it comes to GSoC, selection is a special milestone to pass.

Hoping to have a great time being a mentor this year!

Google Summer of Code meetup at University of Moratuwa

Google Open-Source blog has provided a coverage report for the Google Summer of Code meetup we held at University of Moratuwa on March 17th 2012  . The session has caught the eyes of Stephanie Taylor, and Carol Smith who are from The Google Open Source Programs Office, and showed interest to make it to a blog post.
It can be found at the following link. The content is provided below.
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2012/04/moratuwa-sri-lanka-google-summer-of.html

GSoC 2012 Logo. Image credits: Google Inc.

Special thanks goes to Dr. Chandana Gamage, Dr. Shehan Perera, and Ms. Vishaka Nanayakkara for providing your fullest support for the session. Thanks to all my friends including Nisansa, Pradeeban, Thilanka, Shelan, Subash, Suho, IsuruU, Nirmal who contributed to make this a success.
I heard the department is giving 10 marks for students in 3rd year who get selected into Google Summer of Code. That's great news since it will motivate the students a lot.

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We held our fifth Google Summer of Code meetup in the Moratuwa, Sri Lanka area on March 17th. We had enormous support from the Department of Computer Science & Engineering staff at theUniversity of Moratuwa to make it a full scale session covering many of the aspects of the program that are important to students. We had almost 150 students (a record high) in the morning introductory sessions and around 40 students during the afternoon sessions that were geared more toward second and third year university students.

Kathiravelu Pradeeban delivered an excellent 80 minute Google Summer of Code information presentation focusing on general open source fundamentals from how to communicate within open source communities to proper email/IRC etiquette to open source culture. He also discussed general information about Google Summer of Code such as important dates for the program, how to apply, guidelines on how to write project proposals, and some ideas to think about when deciding if a project is a good fit for you. In later sessions there was more of a focus on open source technologies with demos on how to effectively use these technologies for open source development work.

The students were very excited about the program, and asked many questions both publicly and to us individually after the session ended. We tried to clear up doubts students had about their own ability levels and encouraged them to participate by showing some of the great opportunities of working on a real-life project rather than the fake projects that they do at university most of the time. We also explained about the value of having connections all around the world and the spiritual happiness open source projects bring in general. Those of us that had participated as students with Google Summer of Code shared our experiences including one participant whose Google Summer of Code project caught the eye of a well known IT company who hired him.

Good luck to those students currently applying for Google Summer of Code!

By Kasun Gajasinghe, former Google Summer of Code student for DocBook Project and Gentoo Linux, 2012 DocBook Project mentor  

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DocBook WebHelp UI features by screenshots!

I wrote this blog post to show some of the UI features provided by DocBook WebHelp. So, following is a set of screenshots I took which which is how webhelp will look like in the next release. The next release would probably be versioned as 1.77.x. These are taken from revision r9240 on 2012-03-16. You may download the latest snapshot from DocBook snapshots site. You may download the latest release here.

A chunked output page docbook webhelp. It includes a header in top with a company logo, Contents, and Search panes at left side; the real contents in the right larger section; And some minor but useful features at top-right corner. The browser is Chromium/Google Chrome 16. Click on the screenshot for a larger view.

You may hide/unhide the left sidebar by clicking on  SIDEBAR at top-right corner in the page. Isn't that a easier way to read the contents? or do you prefer the default way? For larger monitors the effect is minimal!

A zoomed view the Contents pane in left. This shows the Table of Contents of the documentation, broken down by chapters/sections. You can configure the number of tree levels if you think it's necessary.

Plain search view. You can turn on/off the Search Highlighter provided. Try it yourself!

A typical search results section.  Read here to understand how the search result summaries appeared! And, we provide search scoring/rating mechanism for better searching.

A search with several words. WebHelp displays the results for the whole query, as well as for individual words which is nicely sectioned as shown above.

Gentoo Maven Integration - Progress Report

Here's my progress report for the first phase of Gentoo Maven Integration project for 
finishing the work under Google Summer of Code and starting move in to 
a voluntary position. 

The goal of this project was to build maven and it's huge number of 
dependencies from source, and then facilitate the packagers for 
packaging maven-based Java packages. There are two eclasses which will 
facilitate bootstrapping maven along with building maven-based 
packages, and packaging Maven plugins. These eclasses address some 
fundamental issues of incompatibilities between Gentoo build system 
and Maven build system. 

There were two main goals for the project. One is building 
maven-from-source. It is now completed and has been thoroughly tested. 
There are around 40+ ebuilds that are direct dependencies of Maven 
which were packaged/bumped during the project period. General users of 
maven can have the full benefit from this package now. Please file 
bugs at https://bugs.gentoo.org/ if you find any. 

The second phase was a lengthy process and the scope wasn't fit for 
one and half months time. But with mentors' blessing, I've made a 
quite a big progress and was able to emerge a minimal package built 
via native Maven. 

Let me describe the surface details of the second phase. The idea was 
to facilitate the packagers to package maven-based packages. This has 
been a long-time blocker for Gentoo-Java (which extends to more than 
3-4 years). For this phase, we needed several requirements including 
dependency management issues and rewriting of pom.xml to match 
Gentoo's needs. One requirement in it was the need to have a mechanism 
to use the installed system jars instead of downloading the jars from 
maven repos. One another is that pom needs to respect the Gentoo SLOT 
system. Further, configuration details needed to be added to tell the 
JDK and JRE versions needed for building (ie need to add config bits 
to maven-compiler-plugin section in the pom). And, then it needs 
several maven plugins to build packages. There were enormous amount of 
plugins available that most of them need special attention separately. 
For the second phase, the hard part is over. And, as I said, I was 
able to emerge a minimal maven-based implementation. Maven isn't much 
cooperative when it comes to dependency management, but our solution 
worked well. 

Along with that, the first iteration of work is complete. I'm hoping 
to be the maintainer for Maven under Gentoo Java herd for the 
foreseeable future. And, I'm eagerly waiting to wear the Gentoo 
Developer hat one day. I'm interested in knowing the generic plan for 
recruiting developers who come via Summer of Code as well. 

There are few things to be done to bring the use of the Maven 
integration to it's full potential. These are more like plug-ins to 
the core base, and beautifying the process. I need to make new plans 
for these with help from Java herd. 

 * There's only five maven plugins has been packaged. Have a fresh 
look at maven-surefire-plugin. Needs to add all other plugins. 

 * Currently, when MAVEN_PARENTPOM_UNIQUE_ID is set to rewrite 
<parent> node of the pom, it rewrites all the poms in the project 
including sub-modules. The most probable usecase is that rewrite the 
parent element of the top-level/aggregator pom. The configuration bits 
needed are already there (-w option), but the implementation needs to 
be done. 

 * Merge the separate ebuilds of  maven-2.2.1 maven-2.2.1 release in 
to one. There are around 20+ ebuilds dedicated for this. These ebuilds 
probably won't be needed separately so it's ok to merge these 
together. Need to evaluate possibility of issues of having all these 
together. 

Here are some references if you are interested in getting deeper in 
Maven in Gentoo. Feel free to contact me if you like to extend your 
helping hand for the project. I'm at kasunbg +spamfree at gmail.com
 
 * The wiki 1 - Developer and User guide for Maven in Gentoo - 
https://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/java/wiki/Maven_Integration
 * The wiki 2 - Manpage for java-maven-2 eclass - 
http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/java/wiki/Maven_Eclass_Manpage
 * Repository 1 - gsoc-maven-overlay - 
https://overlays.gentoo.org/svn/proj/java/gsoc-maven-overlay/
 * Repository 2 - Branch for Javatoolkit - 
http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/java/browser/projects/javatoolkit/branches/kasun/
       * TracBrowser view - 
http://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/java/browser/gsoc-maven-overlay/

ගූගල් සමර් ඔෆ් කෝඩ් 2011 සදහා ශ්‍රී ලංකාවේ ප්‍රවර්ධන සැසි සහ අත් පත්‍රිකා

ඔන්න හා හා පුරා කියල සිංහලෙනුත් බ්ලොග් පෝස්ට් එකක් දාන්නයි මේ ලැහැස්තිය :)

මුලින්ම දාන්න යන්නේ නම් ගූගල් සමර් ඔෆ් කෝඩ් (GSoC) 2011 වෙනුවෙන් හදපු සිංහල අත් පත්‍රිකාව ගැනයි. මේ දවස් වල GSoC උණුසුම හුඟක් අයට දැනිල ඉවරනේ... දැන් අපේ කට්ටිය බරටම FOSS මෘදුකාංග තෝරාගෙන ඒවාට දායක වෙන්න (contribute) පටන් අරන්. අපේ කැම්පස් එක පහු ගිය අවුරුදු වල GSoC වලින් අංක එකේ හිටපු හින්ද [1] [2] ලොකු උනන්දුවක් තියනවා මේ වැඩසටහන ගැන. ඒ ගැන නම් හරිම සතුටුයි, විශේෂයන්ම මටත් ඒ සදහා දායක වෙන්න ලැබීම ගැන. 2010 අවුරුද්දේ ශ්‍රී ලංකාව දහ වෙනි තැන ලබාගත්තා... GSoC කියන්නේ මොකක්ද කියල දැන ගන්න කැමති නම් මෙන්න මේක කියවන්න. http://www.booki.cc/gsocstudentguide/_v/1.0/what-is-google-summer-of-code/

හරි ඉතින් තමන්ට විතරක් කරගෙන හරි යන්නේ නැහැනේ, අනිත් අයටත් උදව් කරන්න එපැයි. :) මේ අවුරුද්දේ එක නිසා මමයි, මගේ බැච් එකේ GSoC කරපු කීප දෙනෙකුයි, සිනියර් බැච් එකේ ප්‍රදීබන් අයියයි එකතු වෙලා අපිට හැකි පමණින් වැඩ කොටසක් කළා. ලොකුවටම කරපු දේ තමයි GSoC ගැන දැනුවත් කිරීමේ සැසි දෙක. ඒවා ගැන දැනගන්න මෙන්න මේක කියවන්න; මේ තියෙන්නේ "FOSS User" සගරාවේ එකේ මෙම සැසි දෙක ආවරණය කරමින් පළවුණු ලිපිය. :) 

ඒ දෙකෙන් පේරාදෙණිය විශ්වවිද්‍යාලයේ තිබුන සැසිය මට විශේෂයි. ඒ වෙන මොකක් හින්ද වත් නෙවෙයි එකට මම ලොකු සහයෝගයක් ලබාදුන්නා සංවිධාන කටයුතු වලට. :) පේරාදෙණිය පැත්තෙන් රසික, මේ සැසිය පවත්වන්න සෑහෙන්න මහන්සි ගත්තා. සම්පත් දායකයින් විදියට සහභාගී වූ ප්‍රදීබන්, නිර්මාල්, තිලංක, කසුන් ලක්ප්රිය අයව අනිවාර්යෙන්ම මතක් කරන්න ඕනේ. අපි ටික තමා මේ බර ඔක්කොම ඇද්දේ! ඒ වගේම IESL හිදී තිබුණු සැසිය සදහා දැන් නම් කිව්ව අය ඇරෙන්න උමාශාන්ති, කෙහෙළිය ඇතුළු සුහෝ යන අය විශාල වැඩ කොටසක් කළා.

අත් පත්‍රිකාවක් කිව්වට මොකද අන්තිමට පුණ්‍ය අනුමෝදනාවක් වගේ උනා නේද? ;)) තරහ වෙන්න එපා, මෙන්න තියනවා හදපු සිංහල අත් පත්‍රිකාව. සෝදුපත් බලන්න උදව් උනා කෙහෙළිය, අකිල, නිර්මාල්. මෙන්න ලින්ක් එක. http://www.slideshare.net/kasunbg/google-summer-of-code-2011-sinhalese-flyer

උමාශාන්ති දෙමල අත් පත්රිකාවකුත් හැදුවා, ඒක මෙන්න මෙතන ඇති.

[1] http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2008/05/this-weeks-top-10s-universities-for.html

[2] http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/09/tasty-new-google-summer-of-code-stats.html

Google Summer of Code 2011 Sinhalese flyer

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