TurboGears and the Google Summer of Code 09

The GSOC started officially yesterday. For those of you that don’t know it it’s a program from google to get university student involved in open source, google it for more info.

TurboGears got accepted for 3 projects this year! You can read the proposals here.

1. The first one (in points) is by a second time student with us. His name is Sanjiv and he is from India, in his last GSOC he created a bunch of ToscaWidgets for a big set of libraries, and since he was so good at it he started to work on tgext.geo which is an extension to TurboGears to provide geospatial libraries support. We liked that so much that he now has the full summer to get that going, and I’m really looking forward for his work.
2. Our second project is going to be developed by Jesse Howarth and it is something I have been expecting from quite some time. And it’s actually two small projects and I love both of them. The first one (in order of appearance) is to finish up our last year GSOC project to provide a webUI for Builbot, for those that don’t know it buildbot is a “integration testing tool” it will checkout, build, run tests, run your project and yell at you if you break the tip, together with a webUI to manage it, that rocks! The second is a very interesting tool for building online documentation based on sphinx, there is little to know about how it’s going to work but it will be awesome if we could get something that will allow people to manage documentation just as if it where code with a web based review interface.
3. And the third it’s a problem I have been wanting to work on for quite some time. I won’t lie to you. I wrote the idea and Alexandru Marinescu is going to step up and code it, and in the process we are going to leave a ton of very useful tgext to be used by the community. The project is currently split into 3 areas,
   1. User management, we are building tgext.registration, tgext.profile and maybe tgext.oath and tgext.openid, those last two should probably be repoze.who plugins instead. The idea is that tgext.registration will provide everything that is needed so no one will ever need to write a registration module again Profile on the other hand is a very nice tool to manage users it will provide a custom admin for ‘administrators’ to manage their users, as well as password reset forms and more
   2. A complete web based frontend for mercurial, to view a repository. This is in spirit a rewrite of hgweb with the goals of making it more flexible and to provide some additional features
   3. And this is where the cool stuff starts, a web based repository management tool for mercurial. This part of the project is a bit fusy but it it’s initial feature set is support for ‘create repo’, ‘fork’ and ‘pull request’, after that it’s open to adding as many features as people need.

I have great hopes for us students and I’m looking forward for their work. If you want to follow you should join us on the mailing list turbogears-gsoc@googlegroups.com and check out the site we have put up for this http://gsoc.turbogears.org/