Google Summer of Code Projects Announced

Google have announced the projects and students for this years Summer of Code. We received the biggest number of students allocated to a project with 47 taking part. Applications which will be worked on include Amarok, KOffice, Marble and entirely new features such as a collaborative text editor.

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Comments

by Daniel Molkentin (not verified)

I know, and I will look into it this weekend.

by Anon (not verified)

Seems to be working now - thanks for helping to lick the Dot into shape :)

by Hannes Hauswedell (not verified)

Maybe Amarok should have applied seperately though.
I recognize Amarok is one of the most famous KDE-Apps, but still I think too many projects were assigned to it (after all amarok is not part of the default kde-desktop - thank god ;) ).
Anyways, congradulations for getting that many assigned students.

I am especially looking forward to "Jingle video and voice chat in Kopete"!

by illogic-al (not verified)

We hate you too.

-signed
illogic-al
insanity

by mactalla (not verified)

To all the students who were accepted: Congrats! I hope you enjoy it and I look forward to the results.

I am, however, disappointed that my single most anticipated project didn't make the list ( http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-multimedia&m=120640149026582&w=2 ). I do hope Konrad is still able to find time to work on it without GSoC. Subtitles could really benefit from his work, and I think many many people (myself included) would appreciate it.

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

I'm glad a project for webkit-kpart was approved.
Now I can drop my plans for a webkit browser, hehheheheh.

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

Also noticed a project to add libjinble into kopete for audio & video: OH YEAH!
I miss it really a lot.

by Sebastian Sauer (not verified)

Why drop it? You could also just join the current work on it to be sure the solution still comes with everything your own solution would have.

p.s. http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/bindings/phpqt/ ;)

by Yves (not verified)

A standalone QtWebKit-based browser is already existing, and in need of contributors: http://code.google.com/p/arora/

by fhd (not verified)

There you go, so it's official, it will come!

I'm so depending on this one, I am sure that all living things will never feel any positive feeling ever again if kate doesn't get a decent vi mode!11!!eleven!

GO FOR IT ERLEND HAMBERG, YOU'RE A HERO!

PS:
Let's have a church of kate!

I already entered the church of emacs in my years of study, I hope these religions are compatible!
I would, if I could, actually leave the church of emacs. Never used it anyways. But RMS is just too arrogant to provide us with a respective sentence...

Well honestly, loads of cool projects going on, and KDE 4.0 surely needs a lot of manpower these days. Having invested so much in fast and easy application development, it should really work out like a charm.

by Erlend (not verified)

Finally! I have crazy fan boys! :-)

I hope you will be happy :-)

by Beat Wolf (not verified)

is there anything done to get the students on board that did not get accepted?
I think a little special event where all students not accepted are invited (do you have their email adresses?) would be nice, if only 10% would try to complete their project even without SoC it would be a huge win for kde

by Terracotta (not verified)

Last year KDE did something like the GSC don't know if there was a reward though.

by Hans (not verified)

I think it would be nice with an unofficial SoC for those who didn't get picked. Small brainstorm:

- The mentors pick projects they think would benefit the application etc.

- There would still be lots of proposals left. Now it's time to decide the final ones.
All projects accepted by the mentors will be put on a website, and everyone can vote for their favorite. The special thing here is that you "vote" by donating money - the more you donate, the more it counts. You may pay for more than one proposal.

- Let's say five projects get accepted. The money from the voting gets distributed evenly between these projects. It'll be used to pay the student and mentor after the work's finished.

Something like that. What do you say? There sure are many problems to be addressed, but what do you think about the basic concept? Is it possible, is it be fair?

Personally I would happily donate at least 10 Euro to see my favorite feature in KDE, for example extenders in plasma. And I'm a poor student without much money left in the end of every month. Surly there are more people who are willing to donate to motivate students to finish the project?

by Stefan Majewsky (not verified)

We did already have a special GSoC metting on #kdegames IRC.

by Sebastian (not verified)

Sounds like an interesting concept. But I am not sure if I correctly understood what is intended. Are there any mock-ups, videos or may somebody explain it any further?

by Jonathan Thomas (not verified)

http://plasma.kde.org/cms/1069
Does an animated gif along with an explanation count? :P

by Sebastian (not verified)

Ah, that one. Thanks.

by Rob Scheepmaker (not verified)

You can also take a look at my blog where I try to explain it a bit further:

http://pindablog.wordpress.com/2008/04/23/gsoc-extenders-project/

by JRT (not verified)

I see two projects:

Integration of WebKit SVG library with KHTML

WebKit SVG Filters Design and Implementation

There seems to be some inconsistency in the project descriptions regarding which features are available for SVG in WebKit. Perhaps the two projects could work together on this.

IAC, there is an architecture question here. KHTML currently uses a KPart from KDEGraphics to render SVG. This KPart is based in QSVG. It appears to me that if this is to be changed (and work is needed since QSVG doesn't support filters) that work should be done on the bottom of the stack -- on KDEGraphics rather than changing the library that KHTML uses to render SVGs.

Then it appears that WebKit currently doesn't support much (if any) more of the SVG features than QSVG does. I would like to point out again that Apache Batik has a very good SVG renderer which is written in Java. Rather than reinventing the wheel, could this existing code be used? Either by porting the Java to C++, using JNI to use the Java code, or compiling the Java code into C++ classes with GCJ.

by fred (not verified)

> Then it appears that WebKit currently doesn't support much (if any) more of the SVG features than QSVG does. I would like to point out again that Apache Batik has a very good SVG renderer which is written in Java. Rather than reinventing the wheel, could this existing code be used? Either by porting the Java to C++, using JNI to use the Java code, or compiling the Java code into C++ classes with GCJ.

QtSVG only supports SVG Tiny, whereas WebKit's SVG is intended to support full SVG.

Uhmm... porting Batik? I guess it will introduce a lot more problems than porting WebKit SVG into KHTML.