Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a yearly effort run by Google to bring students and open source projects together. Open source projects apply to be mentoring organizations. Google selects some organizations where students then apply. A limited number of them is selected to work on the projects. Each selected student gets a stipend from Google.
This year Google has funded 1184 student projects for 178 organizations.
Among the selected organizations were JBoss community and Vert.x with a total of 13 (10+3) students out of 106 (80+26) proposals. I have written about the fact that JBoss community has been selected back in March.
In total 12 (9+3) students passed the evaluations at mid-term and the end of this years GSoC program.
The projects
The awesomeness of the program is that the student projects are as diverse as the projects in Red Hat JBoss and Vert.X communities. Below you will links to full project descriptions at the summer of code site, so I'll only pick some examples.
One project was refining the existing Android client for the Hawkular monitoring system while another on the mobile side augmented the AeroGear Unified Push Server with support for the new WebPush protocol. Yet another one plugged the Drools rules engine into Minecraft so that the behavior of the world can actually be modified by those rules.
On the software development side there were projects around the Ceylon language to enhance documentation (processing) and to integrate with the TypeScript language. Another project addressed the issue of large test suites that it often takes long to actually get to the tests that are actually affected by code changes.
Two of the Vert.X projects dealt with getting Vert.X even quicker up and running by providing best-practice documents and blueprints for new applications and around the DevOps aspect with CI/CD and monitoring. Last but not least there was a project to extend the Vert.X internal event bus over TCP to make it available to clients written in C, Rust or Python.
Detailed list of Vert.x student projects:
https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organizations/6170617833324544/#projects
Detailed list of JBoss community student projects:
https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organizations/5944037739593728/#projects
Further outcome
As Google Summer of Code is meant to introduce students to Open Source and to create a lasting engagement between project and student it is cool to know that almost all students want to continue contributing to their projects and the JBoss & Vert.X communities. This is a huge success for the program and the involved communities.
Google has published some more statistics to look at.
Last updated: May 31, 2024