For the third time now, Google offers it's Summer of Code (SoC) program. It's Google's way of helping open source projects by paying bounties for serious contributions. To keep the work serious, every project consists of
- a student that does the work, the SoC project only accepts projects from students
- a mentor who helps provides help and advice about the project, and who evaluates the project at the end (to make sure the bounty is deserved)
- a mentoring organization that provides mentors, these are usually organizations involved with open source projects
The list of accepted Ruby projects covers a lot of topics.
- Ruby on Rails
Apotomo Model-Driven Development Kit for Rails builds on Rails. Tooling support comes in the form of better debugging support, possibly allowing to inspect the state of Rails in the Web interface and a load tester plugin for Rails. - Networking
Atom is a replacement for RSS, and one project aims to provide support for the Atom Publishing Protocol. Another effort will provide an protocol framework using EventMachine, an event-processing library in Ruby and Ragel, a library that allows to compile state machine definitions into executable code. Another project builds an extension for FireWatir, a browser-driving tool used for testing web applications. - Scientific Programming
A Framework for ETL and Data mining operations and extensions to the Matrix module should be useful for code that involves big amounts of data. Adding an interface to Gecode will permit the use of constraint programming in Ruby. - Ruby Implementations
Two projects aim to make the job of Ruby runtime implementors easier. JRuby, Ruby.NET, Rubinius and other project that re-implement the Ruby runtime, need detailed information about the behavior of Ruby. One project will create an RSpec suite for Ruby implementations, whereas the other will also use RSpec to create a spec for the Ruby core. A long standing problem in Ruby is the lack of a Ruby parser written in Ruby, something that the project for creating a Ruby parser with ANTLR might solve. - Miscellaneous
Rubyland will allow to extend Desktop applications with Ruby using application specific event sources which generate events that can then by processed by Ruby. dcov will allow to check the documentation coverage of Ruby code, similar to the rcov tool, which checks test coverage.
InfoQ will be reporting on a number of the following projects with in-depth news coverage in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for more information.