Eclipse Day Florence will take place on May 10, 2013 in Florence, Italy. View the full agenda and register here.

Apache Allura (the technology behind the SourceForge developer platform) is looking for Google Summer of Code students. You can read the blog post about this HERE, and read more about what’s involved in the process in the wiki.

Today we have a guest post from Mahmoud Fayed of the Programming Without Coding Technology project.

During the last 8 years (since Dec. 2005) we have been working on developing a General-Purpose Visual Programming Language, Our goal is to present a tool for novice programmers and expert programmers at the same time.

The project development is a based on the implementation of new research ideas and getting feedback from our users.

We created the following movie today to present some of the PWCT features and how programmers can use it to create real world applications:

We are going to release PWCT 1.9 (Art) during the next 60 days with these features.

(cross-posted from the Official Google blog)

If you’re a university student with CS chops looking to earn real-world experience this summer, consider writing code for a cool open source project with the Google Summer of Code program.


Over the past eight years more than 6,000 students have “graduated” from this global program, working with almost 400 different open source projects. Students who are accepted into the program will put the skills they have learned in university to good use by working on an actual software project over the summer. Students are paired with mentors to help address technical questions and concerns throughout the course of the project. With the knowledge and hands-on experience students gain during the summer they strengthen their future employment opportunities in fields related to their academic pursuits. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

Interested students can submit proposals on the website starting now through Friday, May 3 at 12:00pm PDT. Get started by reviewing the ideas pages of the 177 open source projects in this year’s program, and decide which projects you’re interested in. Because Google Summer of Code has a limited number of spots for students, writing a great project proposal is essential to being selected to the program. Be sure to check out the Student Manual for advice.

For ongoing information throughout the application period and beyond, see the Google Open Source blog, join our Summer of Code mailing lists or join us on Internet relay chat at #gsoc on Freenode.

Good luck to all the open source coders out there, and remember to submit your proposals early—you only have until May 3 to apply!

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source team

As we mentioned two weeks ago, the final push to upgrade all remaining classic projects starts today. We’ll be starting with the longest-inactive projects, and working towards the present.

If you need to delay the upgrade for any reason, you must notify us immediately, so that we can add you to the delay list.

Here’s the projects we’re featuring this week:

• OS X Portable Applications

  OS X FOSS applications packaged as portable so that can carried around on any portable device, USB thumb drive, iPod, portable hard drive, memory card or other portable device.

• Subversion for Windows

  Win32 build of Subversion. These binaries are built using Visual C++ 6.0 Should work on all flavours of Windows from Win2000 to Win8 and 2008 Server including server variants (not all tested). (1.7.x does not work on NT4 due to APR using new functions). Modules for Apache 2.2.x and 2.4.x (1.7.6 and up) is included. Language bindings are NOT tested. Source code is found at the Apache Subversion site at http://subversion.apache.org/ Code in this project is just a “Build script” and patches for VC6

• MinGW-builds

  Snapshots and releases builds of the MinGW compiler that use CRT & WinAPI from the mingw-w64 project.

• ReactOS

  ReactOS is an open source effort to develop a quality operating system that is compatible with applications and drivers written for the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003).

• MPC-BE

  Media Player Classic – BE is a free and open source audio and video player for Windows. Media Player Classic – BE is based on the original “Media Player Classic” project (Gabest) and “Media Player Classic Home Cinema” project (Casimir666), contains additional features and bug fixes.

• ZABBIX

  ZABBIX is an enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution designed to monitor and track performance and availability of network servers, devices and other IT resources. It supports distributed and WEB monitoring, auto-discovery, and more.

• TV-Browser – A free EPG

  TV-Browser is a java-based TV guide which can be easily extended with lots of plugins. It is designed to look like your paper TV guide.

• DavMail POP/IMAP/SMTP/Caldav to Exchange

  Ever wanted to get rid of Outlook ? DavMail is a POP/IMAP/SMTP/Caldav/Carddav/LDAP gateway allowing users to use any mail client with Exchange, even from the internet through Outlook Web Access on any platform, tested on MacOSX, Linux and Windows

This is 1 p2f file, that lets you install CoffeeScript Editor by Adam Schmideg & Formula/400
https://github.com/adamschmideg/coffeescript-eclipse
just in one sequence (Coffee + required XText together).

It has syntax highlight and outline. See screenshot.
Sadly, it has not been updated for more than a year.

Instructions:
1. Save p2f file https://raw.github.com/Nodeclipse/eclipse-node-ide/master/CoffeeScriptSet.p2f
2. File -> Import \ Install Software Items from File

News: May 1st 2013, Adam has blessed Nodeclipse to be new home for CoffeeScript Editor.

The project is looking for owner
https://github.com/Nodeclipse/coffeescript-eclipse

As I mentioned in the last platform updates post, we’re primarily focused on upgrade-related work lately, but we found time to put in a few enhancements to the platform in the last sprint.

A new macro was added to the wiki syntax. Putting [[members]] in a wiki article will produce a list of all the members of the project. By default, this is limited to 20 members, with a link to a full list if you’ve got more than that. You can link directly to that longer list, if you like. For example, here’s TikiWiki’s full list of developers.

Next, the interfaces for adding tags to tickets was improved to make it easier to find tags that you’ve already used. Starting to type a tag will produce a dropdown of tags from which to select.

And, we’ve added a $USER variable that you can use in ticket searches, which will be replaced, at search time, with the currently-active user. For example, if you search for reported_by:$USER, the variable $USER, you’ll get all the tickets reported by the currently logged in user. In this way, you can add a saved search to your ticket tracker so that each user can keep tabs on their own tickets.

So, if you look at the Allura ticket tracker, you’ll see a new “My Tickets” button under “Searches”, which will show you the tickets you’ve opened. (Of course, you’ll have to be logged in for that to work.)

We’re really looking forward to being done with the upgrade process, so that we can focus more on improving the developer experience, and we’d love to hear your feedback on what we should work on next. You can see what’s scheduled for upcoming sprints, and vote on tickets, in the Allura ticket tracker.

As we near the start of the student application period on April 22nd for Google Summer of Code 2013, we wanted to give a shout out to the other superstars (besides the students) essential to the success of the program, the mentors and organization administrators (org admins). We recently sent a survey to the Google Summer of Code Mentors group list and discovered that the program has come full circle for many of the mentors who once started out as students and had so much fun that they felt the desire to mentor new students themselves.

Of the 132 mentors that filled out the survey, 23 have been a part of the program for four or more years out of the last eight years of the Google Summer of Code program. Below is a list of the mentors and organization administrators* with the organizations they worked with and the years in each role. In many cases they both acted as an organization administrator and a mentor during the summer program.

Thank you for all of your dedication and the guidance you provide the students!

Name Organization Years Participated as a Student Years Participated as a Mentor Years Participated as an Org Administrator Luca Barbato Gentoo, Libav and Audacious ---- 2006-2012 2007 Reimar Bauer MoinMoin Wiki ---- 2007-2012 2010-2012 Olly Betts SWIG and Xapian Search Engine Library ---- 2008, 2009, 2011, 2012 2009, 2011, 2012 Bastian Blank MoinMoin and Debian 2008 2009-2012 2011 Marc Delisle PhpMyAdmin ---- 2008-2012 2010-2012 Philipp Kewisch Mozilla ---- 2009-2012 ---- Luis Gustavo Lira E-cidadania ---- 2008-2012 ---- Hin-Tak Leung The Linux Foundation ---- 2008, 2010-2012 ---- Scott McCreary Haiku ---- 2009-2012 ---- Aaron Meurer SymPy 2009, 2010 2011, 2012 2011, 2012 Tom Musgrove Blender Foundation ---- 2010-2012 2008-2012 Erik Ogenvik Worldforge ---- 2008-2012 2009-2012 Josef Perktold Python Software Foundation ---- 2009-2012 ---- Lydia Pintscher KDE ---- 2008 2007-2012 Alberto Ruiz GNOME ---- 2009-2012 ---- Kevin Smith XSF 2006 2007-2009, 2011-2012 2009, 2011, 2012 Harlan Stenn NTP Project, FreeBSD, Google OSPO, GNU ---- 2008-2012 2009-2012 Ian Taylor GCC ---- 2006, 2007, 2010, 2011 2006-2010 David Trowbridge Review Board ---- 2007, 2009-2012 2009-2012 Frances Tyers Apertium ---- 2009-2012 2009-2012 Thomas Waldmann MoinMoin Wiki ---- 2006-2009, 2011, 2012 2006-2012 Frank Warmerdam OSGeo ---- 2006-2010, 2012 2006 Marina Zhurakhinskaya GNOME ---- 2009-2011 2012

Organizations are currently busy talking with prospective students about their ideas for projects over the summer. For more information about the Google Summer of Code, visit the program site and check out this year’s important dates. 
 *This is not a comprehensive list of all mentors and organization administrators who have participated 4 or more times in the program, only a list of those who filled out our survey. 

 By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

This m2e connector for WRO4J (https://code.google.com/p/wro4j/) will execute wro4j-maven-plugin:run on Eclipse incremental builds, if a change is detected on css, js, less, json, sass resources under wro4j-maven-plugin's contextFolder (src/main/webapp by default)

In order for m2e-wro4j to be enabled, projects in eclipse must be Maven-enabled with m2e (right-click on project > Configure > Convert to Maven...)

If m2e-wtp is installed and wro4j's target directories are set under ${project.build.directory}/${project.build.finalName/ then the resources will be generated under ${project.build.directory}/m2e-wtp/web-resources/ so they can be picked up and deployed by WTP on the fly.

New releases are available from http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/m2e-wro4j/

Dev builds can be installed from http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/builds/staging/m2e-wro4j/all/repo/

Today’s guest post is from Ogre3D, one of this week’s front-page featured projects.

As our Ogre3D project was selected as one of the featured “Sourceforge Projects of the Week” (together with a list of various other great communities), we were given the opportunity for a featured guest post on the SF.net blog and of course we could not pass up that chance. Therefore, in the following lines we will try to quickly introduce you to our project (in case you hadn’t heard of it before) and point out some of the newer developments (in case you know our project already, but have either lost touch or just need a refresher). So here we go…

Ogre3D – What’s that?
Ogre3D is a free, open-source, object-oriented rendering engine as the name indicates once you decrypt it: OGRE = Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine. It was created by Steve Streeting back in 2001 who spear-headed the development team for many years, before retiring in 2010 as the official face. You might also know him as the creator of SourceTree (highly acclaimed Git and Hg client, originally only for Mac but now also available for PC) and nowadays as an employee over at Atlassian.

Today, Ogre3D supports a wide variety of different platforms thanks to the fact that it can run with Direct3D (D3D9 and D3D11) as well as different OpenGL variants (OpenGL 3+, OpenGL ES & ES 2). We currently cover Windows (incl. support for Win8/WinRT with Metro), Linux, Mac OS X, iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8 as officially supported platforms. This means you basically only have to develop your application core once and then just need to take care of some platform dependent things such as input or window/application handling in general.
Apart from the core engine there is also a vibrant eco system of wrappers/extensions/plugins that help to create a complete set/tool-chain around Ogre3D, including:

• Wrappers to all major physics engines
• Various GUI library integrations as well as pure Ogre3D ones
• Importer and exporter for all major modeling tools and formats
• Highly specialized plugins e.g. for realistic water and sky rendering
• etc.

Ogre3D – Who’s using it?
We are proud to say that our engine is used in a wide variety of different projects and genres, ranging from the classic gaming sector (desktop and mobile) to virtual reality applications and scientific simulations. To give you a quick impression we listed some of the more recent and notable creations below:

• Torchlight I & II: Highly acclaimed game developed by a veteran team composed of the designers and leads of projects like Diablo, Diablo II, Mythos, etc. and is by far the most successful title with Ogre3D (Torchlight 1 went platinum in early 2011)
• Family Farm / Goods Folks: Cartoonish 3D family simulation by Hammerware Studios
• Salvation Prophecy: Military space game with space simulation and third person shooter elements
• Anomalous Medical: A medial framework based around the human head, meaning that it offers a very detailed and anatomically correct model of a human head that you can move around, look into and examine in various other ways.
• Others include: Proun, Garshasp – Monster Slayer, ZombieDriver, Victory – Age of Racing, Venetica, Book of Unwritten Tales, GolfBlaster3D, MotorM4X, etc.

Ogre3D – Who’s doing the magic?
Ogre3D is nowadays maintained and developed by a dedicated team of core members each one focusing on different areas of expertise, as well as a number of highly regarded contributors working on various aspects of the engine or supplying patches or bug reports on our Ogre3D JIRA tracker for any issues they might find. And of course there is a great team of forum admins and moderators along with community helpers who try to answer as many questions as possible and assist wherever they can.

Ogre3D – What’s going on right now?
Right now, we are in the process of releasing the first release candidate for our next major version Ogre3D 1.9, which will be the first official release containing proper Android and Direct3D11 support, as well as the Windows Phone 8 integration that Nokia and Microsoft provided us with. That new version will also contain all the great additions and improvements produced by our four Google Summer of Code students from last year.

We have also been approved by Google for GSoC 2013 and are currently in the process of looking for highly qualified and motivated students, since for the next release Ogre 2.0 we will have to do some heavy refactoring and restructuring in the core of the rendering logic to boost performance to new heights.

Ogre3D – Where to check it out?
Well, obviously there is information here on Sourceforge as well as the downloads for our SDK versions, but apart from that there of course is our homepage www.ogre3d.org which provides some further information, but probably the most informative space and also the most vibrant would be our great forums at www.ogre3d.org/forums as well as our addon section (for e.g. physic wrappers, GUI libraries, Ogre3D extensions, etc.) at www.ogre3d.org/addonforums. And for everyone looking for some tutorials to get started or some code snippets for common tasks, have a look at our community wiki which should get you going.
If you need to directly get in touch with the development or admin team, we would kindly refer you to the contact details on www.ogre3d.org/contact.

We are pleased to announce that the Ganeti team at Google is hosting the Xen Hackathon 2013 on May 16-17 at the Google offices in Dublin, Ireland.

The aim of the Hackathon is to give developers the opportunity to meet face to face to discuss development, write code and collaborate with other developers as well as allowing everyone to put names with faces. Given that the Ganeti team will host the event, there will be more of a focus on management stacks and cloud integration. This year the organizers are planning more structure at the Hackathons and will cover Xen on ARM, Xen 4.4 planning as well as any topics that attendees may want to discuss.

Pre-registration, which includes a $15 contribution to Threshold (an Irish charity that works to prevent homelessness) is required for attendance. Space is limited for the event and usually fills up very quickly. To register for the Xen Hackathon, visit the event page and request an invitation. You will be notified by email within 10 days as to whether your request has been accepted and then you will need to confirm or reject your invitation. Once you confirm your invitation by filling out your registration details you will be officially registered.

We hope to see you in May!

By Guido Trotter, Ganeti team

impulse is a waveform viewer integrated into the eclipse framework. It allows to view the signal levels of either digital or analog circuit design. The plugin can be used on most platforms such as Windows, Linux and OsX.

Create new view configurations by dragging signals or signal folders (scope) into the configuration tree. Toggle between multiple configurations. Use Drag&Drop or Cut&Paste to reorganize the views content. Everything behaves like the rest of Eclipse.

You can add as many cursor you need. Toggle between cursors and cursor positions. Use cursors to zoom in and out or do an instant measure.

New and Noteworthy in 0.5.2 OS compatiblity Linux Gtk2 ok (development basis) Windows ok OSX ok Tested Versions - 3.6 on request 3.7 ok (3.7.2) 4.2 ok (4.2.2)

Sprout is a project dedicated to a nested key-value pair programming language native to the Entity Attribute Value database model. Its environment is a Relational Database Management System, specifically Postgres 9. It is implemented with Procedural SQL and employs a key-value translator vernacular to EAV data model. The model provides storage of objects, object metadata definitions and program code. Sprout executes requests via SQL client interface and returns objects of various types. It has characteristics of a column-oriented database.

Check it out!

In the last eight weeks, over 18 Google Summer of Code meetups have been organized by students, mentors and open source enthusiasts in locales as diverse as Turkey, Sri Lanka, France, Italy, Macedonia, Canada, and Austria. A handful of meetups will be held in the next couple of weeks all leading up to to the start of the student application period for Google Summer of Code on April 22nd. Below is a summary of a recent meetup in Austria held by members of the Catroid Project.
The Catroid Project has been lucky to be a part of Google Summer of Code for the past two years (we were just chosen for a third year). During that time we have noticed that European students are less likely to apply for the Google Summer of Code program, or at least for our project. We believe that there is a lack of information about Google Summer of Code and Free and open source software (FOSS) in general here in Europe and we feel there is great potential for FOSS projects to acquire more contributors if students only knew about initiatives like Google Summer of Code. Our goal with these meetups is to inform university students about Google Summer of Code and to spark interest in FOSS.  We held a Google Summer of Code information session at the University of Technology in Graz, Austria on the 13th of March 2013 where there were over 50 students from various information technology fields. We held a second session at the Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey on the 11th of April with 10 students in attendance.  Meetup at University of Technology in Graz, Austria Our information sessions are designed as a general introduction into Google Summer of Code including what the program is, who can participate, a short overview of projects that participated in previous years, how to apply, and who should apply. Next Sercan Akpolat did a presentation on the Catroid Project and Peter Grasch presented on KDE. They discussed their projects, the mentoring process and the way they go about choosing students from their many applications. We then ended with a question and answer (Q&A) session.  We had very positive feedback and realized that none of the students had ever heard of Google Summer of Code before walking into the room. During the Q&A, the students expressed their concerns about the workload necessary for Google Summer of Code. Most questions regarded the expertise and working hours required for successful participation in the program.   Based on his experience in previous Google Summer of Code years, Sercan explained that the typical workload is challenging but achievable. Regarding the expertise level required for the program, Sercan and Peter explained that intermediate knowledge is sufficient. The Google Summer of Code is designed to inspire young developers to begin participating in open source development, to learn and to broaden their minds.  By Annemarie Harzl and Sercan Akpolat, The Catroid Project  You can visit the Google Summer of Code website for more information on the 177 mentoring organizations that students will be working with this summer.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Team

To mark the Kepler Simultaneous Release, Eclipse community members are organizing DemoCamps and Hackathons around the world between June 1 -30. Sign up to attend one in your city, see the DemoCamp/Hackathon wiki.

This week we’re featuring the following projects:

• Kiwix

  Kiwix is an offline reader for Web content. It’s especially intended to make Wikipedia available offline. With Kiwix, you can enjoy Wikipedia on a boat, in the middle of nowhere… or in Jail. Kiwix manages to do that by reading ZIM files, a highly compressed open format with additional meta-data.

• PMD

  PMD is a source code analyzer. It finds common programming flaws like unused variables, empty catch blocks, unnecessary object creation, and so forth. It supports Java, JavaScript, XML, XSL. Additionally it includes CPD, the copy-paste-detector. CPD finds duplicated code in Java, C, C++, C#, PHP, Ruby, Fortran, JavaScript. You can fork us on https://github.com/pmd

• Bochs x86 PC emulator

  Bochs is a portable x86 PC emulation software package that emulates enough of the x86 CPU, related AT hardware, and BIOS to run Windows, Linux, *BSD, Minix, and other OS’s, all on your workstation.

• Virtual Lighttable and Darkroom

  Darktable is a virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers: it manages your digital negatives in a database and lets you view them through a zoomable light table. It also enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.

• Luminance HDR

  Luminance HDR is a complete suite for HDR imaging workflow. It provides a wide range of functionalities, both during the fusion and the tonemapping stage. Its graphical user interface, based on Qt4, runs on a multitude of platform, like Microsoft Windows (32 and 64 bit), Mac OS X 10.6 and above and several Linux distribution. Input images can be supplied in multiple formats, from JPEG to RAW files. In the same way, output can be saved in many different formats as well, from JPEG to TIFF (both 8 bit and 16 bit per channel), enabling all the power of your post processing tools.

• iText®, a JAVA-PDF library

  This library contains classes that generate documents in the Portable Document Format (PDF).

• Convertigo

  Convertigo is the most advanced Open Source Mobile Application Development Platform for Enterprises, featuring all the required components needed to develop and to run cross-platform mobile enterprises application connected to enterprise’s back-end business applications. – Large variety of connectors to enterprise apps – Mashup sequencer to orchestrate and combine data and processes from multiple enterprise apps. – Cross-platform WebApp and Native app mobile application development tools for iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone platforms – Security managers and Identity managers – Mobile application updates and administration – Monitoring and administration tools. Convertigo can also be used for transactionnal portal integration and for SOA enablement of legacy web or Mainframe applications. Convertigo Community Edition is AGPL based.

• PyTables – Hierarchical datasets

  The goal of PyTables is to enable the end user to efficiently and easily manipulate large datasets (both homogenous, i.e. arrays, and heterogenous, i.e. tables) on a persistent, hierarchical way.

• Openfiler

  Openfiler is a browser-based network storage management utility. Linux-powered, Openfiler delivers file-based Network Attached Storage (NAS) and block-based SAN in a single framework. It supports CIFS, NFS, HTTP/DAV, FTP, and iSCSI.

Subclipse 1.8.20 release is now available. This is the release to use for Subversion 1.7.x working copy compatibility with other tools. A complete changelog is available at http://subclipse.tigris.org/subclipse_1.8.x/changes.html

The Metafacture IDE provides Eclipse integration for the Culturegraph Metafacture tools.

It currently consists of an Xtext-based editor and a launcher for the Metafacture Flux language. Flux is a domain-specific language (DSL) used to drive metadata transformation workflows based on Metafacture, a stream based data processing framework with an XML-based metadata transformation language.

Please take 5 - 10 minutes of your time to tell us how you are using Eclipse and open source software by completing the Eclipse Community Survey. Participation deadline is May 10, 2013.