Pencils down

Google Summer of Code 2010 is drawing to a close and Sakai's three students all have exciting contributions to share.  it's particularly great to see that all three are planning to keep up their involvement with Sakai. Many thanks to Google for running another great GSoC, to our volunteer mentors, and everyone in the community who has helped out.

Manoj Inukolunu has implemented a citation manager widget, helped by some joint mentoring from Cambridge, writes:

I have created a citation manager widget for sakai3 with the following features: Add citations, Export in RIS format, Import in RIS format from other reference managers, Comment on Citations, Fetch citations from other sakai3 users, Share the citations, Search for citations (bugs remaining), Delete a specific citation. There are 2 features that needs to be implemented 1) Embed the widget into a course site 2) Add delicious support to Sakai3 (Sakai3 needs to support Oauth for this so waiting) A detailed specification and implementation details can be found at [1].

It has been a wonderful experience to work the Sakai Foundation. The developers have done a great job with the back-end and front-end. The best part was the modularity and the design. My project in the beginning was to use external citation-managers and design a citation-manager for Sakai3.The project changed a lot since the beginning [1]. I found my project intimidating in the beginning because I didnt know what to do.I did a lot of research and came up with the design spec [1] with the help of my mentor (Amyas Phillips who has been a great mentor). GSoC has been the single greatest experience in my life so far and the most productive summer so far, the interaction with the community(thanks very much for all the guys who helped me ) was the best part.I learned many things. The real world experience I gained was very valuable. I feel sad that the program is coming to an end. I am planning to continue with my project after GSoC I am also planning to join the sakai community.

My specification and implementation details are at [1] Code is at [2] and[3]

[1] http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/3AK/Citation+Manager+widget+specification+proposal
[2] http://github.com/zerocool1989/citation-manager-widget
[3] http://github.com/zerocool1989/exportRIS

Maria Teresa Gimenez Fayos has developed an Android app for interacting with Sakai 2.x instances, working with mentor David Roldan Martinez at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, summarises her GSoC experience thus:

I have archived the main framework of the application, I am still working in a lot of things, I hope some things would be working at the end of this week. There is a lot of work that should be done, because I really thought that the project would be easier, and it is not.

Of course I am planning to continue working on it! In fact this is going to be my final career project. I am going to use all what I learned about android and sakai in this project. So even I could not finish all what I was planning I am not worry because I am going to finish everything, I spend a lot of time of my gsoc learning about the technology and I am going to take advantage of all this knwoledge to put it in the project. At this point I would like to thank David, for all his patience. 

I am related with the open source since my second year at the university when I joined to an open source association called Aditel, and there is where I know GSOC when some fellow participated and they were so happy with the experience that I want to try it too. I knew about Sakai when I began my business practices with Samoo two years ago. Then I have being doing practices in my university (Valencia Polytechnic University) with David Roldán who is being my mentor this last year. I proposed my project, an Android Application, and it came to me from my needs as student.

The community could find all the code is here: http://bitbucket.org/mrs.hopper/nellodee
And I write a blog (in spanish sorry) about sakai, android, technology and so on in http://www.colorines.org/

Ashish Mittal has been developing an 'event explorer tool' for helpdesk users with mentor Ian Boston at Cambridge.  Ashish writes:

It has been a great experience to work under Sakai for GSOC 2010. It is mainly because of the opportunity of working with great experienced people, having a great mentor, working with the most cutting edge technologies for the project and developing a great and successful project at the end. I am very happy I got selected under Sakai Foundation for GSOC and will cherish this period of my introduction to Sakai Community, People at Sakai are great and very helpful and been available through IRC or mailing list whenever any help was needed. This has been the greatest event for me till now and I thank Sakai community for this.

A large part of the project has been accomplished and all the main and essential modules were completed well in time. There might be scope for more work to be done and I think it would be beneficial to the project to add some more features (ex. analysis) as decided earlier to give it an elegant touch.

I do plan to keep adding some features as and when it is possible. I will be consulting my mentor and will ask his opinion what can be worked out.

All the code I have developed is present under my github repo at [1]. The Sakai version of the code has already been included by my mentor in the sandbox area under the name eventexplorer.

[1] http://github.com/ashishmittal/eventexplorer

Tenth week of Event Explorer (Ashish)

The past week I worked on various resourceType for the filters that I need in the UI. Mr. Ian created a page at the KernDoc with those resourceTypes for maintaining a documentation and I have been adding more as I find them. Once I get enough information about all resourceTypes, I will be able to implement the filters.
This week I will continue with this and discuss with my mentor about what is to be done now.