Sunday, March 28, 2010

Ruby Summer of Code 2010

This year, no major Ruby organization got accepted to Google's Summer of Code (even though a half dozen Python projects got accepted, but I won't rant here). What do we as Rubyists do? Take it sitting down? NO! We make our own Summer of Code!

Thanks to Engine Yard, Ruby Central, and the Rails team, Ruby Summer of Code has raised $100k in just three days, allowing us to run 20 student projects! Hooray!

Ruby Summer of Code

Now of course we really would love to have some JRuby projects involved. There's so much exciting stuff going on with JRuby, and I believe it's the most promising platform for really growing the Ruby community. So we've set up a page for JRuby Ruby Summer of Code 2010 ideas. Here's a few to get you started:

  • JRuby on Android work, including command-line tooling, performance work, and all the little bits and pieces needed to make Ruby a first-class Android language.
  • Porting key C extensions to JRuby, so there's an alternative for people migrating.
  • A super-fast lightweight server similar to the GlassFish gem.
  • A full Hibernate and/or JPA backend for DataMapper or DataObjects, so that all databases Hibernate supports "just work" with JRuby.
  • Work on JRuby's nascent suport for Ruby C extensions by building the API out
  • Help get JRuby's early optimizing compiler wired up, to take JRuby's perf to the next level
  • Duby-related projects, like IDE support, better tooling, codebase cleanup, features, documentation.
And there's dozens of other projects out there just waiting for you! Add yourself as a student on the RubySOC page, add some ideas to the JRuby ideas page, and let's get hacking!