GSoC wrap-up

Our second participation in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has been small (one student) but very productive. In case you’re new around here, our student this year is Guy, who has been working on a comparison engine for HTML documents. His code is integrated into Daisy trunk and will be part of the 2.1 release.

While it is still fresh on my mind, I’ll write down what I should not forget for next year’s GSoC:

• we need to improve on the project ideas:
  • put focus on ideas which we actually want to see accomplished (and want to integrate into Daisy). For example, we got many proposals for the “integrate Daisy in non-Java environment” idea, but we had those last year already, so I wasn’t interested in doing that again (with the exception maybe for a browser-hosted Javascript API to access the repository). We also had some nice ideas for which we got no proposals at all…
  • state clearly at the start of the ideas page that students can do interesting projects even if they never heard of Daisy before (and of course, live up to that promise).
• integrating Guy’s work early through the project has made sure that now, at the end, his work is actually put to use, and has had enough testing and polishing.
• have chat or a daisy-gsoc-irc channel available for small talk. Usually it is beneficial to have all communication and decision making in the mailing list archives, but irc might help for small quick questions the students might have.
• Daisy itself needs to be accessible enough to newcomers and developers. The source build improvements in Daisy 2.1 are a first step, but we need to continue working on this.

I hope we’ll be able to participate again next year, I’m looking forward to it already. Lots of thanks to Google for the initiative, to Steven for the getting us in, to Marc since his message brought Guy here, and last but not least to Guy for being a fabulous student.

Daisy 2.1 Release Candidate

Daisy 2.1-RC is now available (download here). This release follows 2.0 a bit sooner than usual, the idea is to provide users quickly with a large amount of smaller improvements. Some of the more notable items:

• Various enhancements to the query language, the navigation manager, the publisher and the faceted browser which will be noticed by people customizing and building on Daisy.
• New functionality: variables in documents and the ability to shift headings when including documents.
• A new Spring-based Daisy Runtime platform for the repository server. Creating and deploying repository plug-ins has become much easier and is now documented.
• A first version of the HTML diff library of our GSOC student, Guy, has been integrated (example, example).
• Doing a first-time build in pre-2.1 Daisy was a rather labor-intensive process. This made building Daisy from source unattractive. Daisy 2.1 corrects this situation, the build is now a lot simpler.

The final Daisy 2.1 release should arrive in about 3 weeks. Everyone’s welcome to provide feedback on the release candidate on the Daisy mailing list.