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Congratulations to the nine students who have been accepted into Google Summer of Code 2009 with The Perl Foundation! Initially TPF was given ten slots, but a duplicate accepted application was generated from other duplication resolutions (it's not a process that is guaranteed to terminate!). Andriy Kushnarov submitted two great applications to the TYPO3 organization as well as an application to TPF regarding plugins for the November wiki. It was decided to donate the slot to TYPO3, so here is our list of the nine accepted applications:

• Cross-platform Perl Bindings for wxWebKit
• Student: Ryan Jendoubi
• Mentor: Michael Peters

• A prototype LLVM JIT runcore for Parrot
• Kevin Tew 
• Mentor: Allison Randal
  

• HTTP/1.1 Compliance Testing and User-Agent Development for the Mojo Web Framework
• Pascal Gaudette
• Mentor: Viacheslav Tykhanovskyi

• Implement BPSW algorithm as a Perl 5 CPAN module, Math::Primality with extensive test-suite
• Robert Kuo
• Mentor: Jonathan Leto
  

• Decimal Arithmetic: BigInt, BigNum and BigRat for parrot
• Daniel Arbelo Arrocha
• Mentor: Christoph Otto
  

• Refactoring Catalyst helper modules
• Devin Austin
• Mentor: Kieren Diment
  

• Perl 6 end-user documentation tools
  
• Hinrik Sigurdsson
• Mentor: Carl Masak
  

• SQL::Translator rewrite
• Justin Hunter
• Mentor: Ash Berlin
  

• Multimethods for SMOP
• Paweł Murias
• Mentor: Daniel Ruoso 

We have some very exciting applications for a wide variety of topics this year, ranging from Perl 5 CPAN modules, to Parrot internals and, of course, Perl 6. The students involved this year are poised to make a tremendous impact to the projects they work on. Now that pesky "implementation" phase begins! Not before a bit of community bonding, but I am sure that students will start coding before the actual, no-more-bonding-lets-code date of May 23rd.

Thank you to everyone involved, especially people in #soc-help on irc.perl.org and those on the tpf-gsoc-students list. You rock. Special thanks goes out to Joshua McAdams who made a cool TPF GSoC 2009 YouTube video!

Is it any coincidence that today is one of the hottest days of the year so far in Portland, OR? In any case, this summer of code is heatin' up.

Are you an eligble student that wants to participate in the Google Summer of Code 2009? Do you want to work on the exciting Rakudo or Parrot projects, or a CPAN module, or your favorite Perl application, or hack on Perl 5 internals? Then you want to apply to The Perl Foundation. Right now this means contacting me directly at jaleto at gmail dot com. Keeping in contact with Twitter is also good, the #gsoc tag is very useful.  You may also want to get some ideas from the 2008 projects.

Applying involves coming up with a well-written document that describes exactly what features you will add or create, along with a timeline with "milestones" of what will be accomplished each week of the summer. Of course this changes with circumstances, but having a good plan always helps. The community members of the project that you apply to should help you with this, as well as give you advice about what is possible in the allotted time and give advice as to what is possible with the current infrastructure of the code. The best ways to do this is to get on developer mailing lists, introduce yourself, perhaps fix a small bug, add a test or some documentation and most probably you will be given some kind of commit access.

If you want to hack on Perl 6 on Parrot aka Rakudo, then all you need is a free GitHub account and you can contribute patches directly. You do this by pressing the  "Fork" button. You should be presented with a page that says there is some "hardcore forking action" going on and then be redirected to your brand-new fresh personal fork of Rakudo. More on this in future posts.

One of the nice features of GitHub is the network-view of a project. For instance, here is the network view of rakudo.git with a base of my fork.  It allows you to visualize which branches have which features pretty quickly, which tells you which branches you should merge with. This has turned out to be immensely useful in all of the GitHub repos that I hack on.

I am interested in being a mentor for TPF this year as well, and some of the random projects that I would be interested in mentoring are:

• Finish BigInt support in Parrot, which may be necessary for Crypto stuff.
  
• Crypto stuff in Parrot/Rakudo
• General Perl 6 Test suite love, like moving tests into t/spec or adding new ones to S29
  
• BigNum PMC support in Parrot, with Rakudo bindings
  
• GSL via NCI in Parrot 
• Crypt::*
  
• implementing warns_ok() in Parrot/Rakudo and write accompanying tests
• Perl 6 user-level documentation
  

Other projects that students may want to check out are:

• November - A wiki engine written in Perl 6
  
• Moose - A modern Perl 5 object system
  
• Catalyst - A very popular Perl web framework
  
• Mojo - A "next generation" web framework for the Perl programming language.

There are tons of other projects, if you are one of them, please let me know!

Students, start getting to know the developer community of the projects now, deadlines are fast approaching!

Patrick Michaud just pushed some changes in r33907 that made hash slices work, so I went rumaging around in S02 and unfudged about 20 passing TODO tests. I also added about 15 tests to S29-trig/trig.t relating to and hyperbolic trig functions.

The "Getting Started With Rakudo (A Flavor of Perl 6)" hack session was a huge success, we actually implemented the "warn" keyword in Rakudo! I mentioned that I was fiddling with Rakudo and I was saddened that "warn" was not implemented and with the help of chromatic we had an initial prototype a few minutes later! Patrick Michaud was also a big help, answering questions about how to run individual tests in the test suite and explaining the fine points of exception handling.

Anyone is welcome to come to the meeting to learn more about Perl 6 and how it is being developed. But if you would like to participate in the "hack session", please bring a laptop with:

The December 2008 PDX.pm meeting will be a a "hack session" where there will be a small "briefing" at the beginning of the meeting (like 5 minutes) then people start hacking away, working on what they want to. This is  a good time for people to put some ideas on the PDX.pm kwiki of what they want to learn about Rakudo or what they want to hack on.

What is Rakudo? Rakudo is the implementation of the Perl 6 spec on the Parrot virtual machine. I call Rakudo a "flavor" because any implementation of Perl 6 that passes the Perl 6 test suite can call itself Perl 6. Perl 5 spec and implementation were one and the same, which meant that any additional implementation that could have ever hoped to be written (which never happened) would have had to be bug-for-bug compatible with the original implementation of Perl 5, because that was the spec. Perl 6 does not repeat this mistake and actually is currently benefiting already from the principle. Pugs was an initial prototype of Perl 6 with the Haskell programming language, which is no longer actively maintained, but it's extensive test suite is currently being converted into the Perl 6 test suite. The pugs test directory is actually an svn external and lives at languages/perl6/t/spec in the Parrot svn repository. As you can see, Rakudo and the Perl 6 test suite still live inside the Parrot repository. This will probably change sometime next year as Parrot gets closer to 1.0 and Rakudo can be built on a fully functional Parrot.

This isn't supposed to make a lot of sense, but you can metaphorically think of Rakudo as the Fourier Transform of Perl5:

 

will be a simpler-to-use representation of which is a sum of smaller and simpler components. Yeah, I think I just wanted to show off my new plugin.