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Meet Joomla!'s 2012 Google Summer of Code Students

Meet Joomla!'s 2012 Google Summer of Code Students

I call it an opportunity and privilege to work with the Joomla community because I always feel like I’ve been given a chance learn first hand from other people. Working with the Google Summer of Code program this year is no different. 

This year’s Joomla - Google Summer of Code program is promising to be quite an exciting one. Recently at JandBeyond, I was able to speak with developers and other Joomla users about these projects in detail. Being able to point to these projects is very exciting, as it shows the real benefits of these projects to the community. Developers, end users, implementers - all members of the Joomla community will reap the end benefits of these projects. 

The students have been asked to write blog posts for the magazine this month which describe their projects in detail. This year we hope to have seven projects at the end of the summer which will impact the Joomla community in some significant ways.

The Students & Projects

Below are brief introductions to the students and their projects. Each of the students have written for this month’s community magazine, an in depth article about their project. Please visit that article for more in depth information on the student and project. 

Aaron Schmitz - API for JGoogle

Aaron is a student at the University of Minnesota, studying for a bachelors in Mechanical Engineering. He has been very successful with Google projects in the past, placing 4th overall in Google Code-In last year (2011). Aaron’s project is to create a structure for implementing APIs from Google. These classes will help to connect Joomla sites to Google. This project should greatly reduce the amount of code necessary for extension developers wishing to connect to Google.

Read more about Aaron here.

Diana Prajescu - API for JFacebook

Diana is a computer science student from the University of Bucharest. She plans to go into web development as a part of her professional career. Her project will involve writing API interfaces to different social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn. These tools should also help reduce the amount duplicate code in Joomla extensions by giving developers a quick and easy way to connect Joomla sites to various social networks, without needing to recreate the wheel each time.

Read more about Diana here.

Florian Voutzinos - Workflow Engine

A third year student of both aeronautics and physics at the University of Toulouse, Florian will be bringing the Joomla project a very useful set of packages to the Joomla libraries. The Workflow engine will allow extension developers and platform users to write complex workflows for their applications.

Read more about Florian.

Javier Gomez - Language Installer

Javier is an existing member of the Joomla community, serving as a board member of Open Source matters. He is also a computer science student at Open University of Catalonia. Javier will be creating an interface in Joomla for installing and managing language packs, both in the installer and within an already-installed Joomla site. This project will continue to break down the language barriers by enabling non-english speakers to have Joomla in their native language from the very first installation page.

Read more about Javier.

Kavith Lokuhewage - CSS / JS Compression

Kavith’s hobbies lie in videography, music, and book reading. His project will bring to the Joomla Platform the ability to compress JavaScript and CSS files before they reach the browser. This will allow for a single method for extension and template developers to take advantage of compression technology, and give users an improved user experience with faster browsing speeds.

Read more about Kavith.

Prasath Nadarajah - MediaWiki API

An undergraduate of computer science and engineering, Prasath is in his final year at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. He is very passionate about open source and contributes to several open source projects. Prasath will be implementing a set of libraries and APIs to connect to MediaWiki. The project will yield a client for accessing MediaWiki within Joomla. 

Read more about Prasath.

Stefan Neculai - Web Services API

Stefan is a third year student of the University of Bucharest in the computer science and engineering department. Several of Stefan’s hobbies include photography, mountain trips, and skating. Stefan’s project will be to create a Web Services API which will be the basis for creating directory-like applications on the platform. 

Read more about Stefan.

Getting Involved

As usual with the Joomla community, there is a way that you can get involved. These students are writing code which, if all things go according to plan, developers will be using for their own projects in the future. Everyone has an interest as to what these projects produce.

I encourage everyone to get in the main platform and CMS mailing lists, look for posts from our students, and help contribute ideas, code reviews, potential problem areas to be considered, etc... to the students. This helps everyone in the community achieve the highest level of benefit from the effort these students are putting forth. 

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