GSoC, Flask, Python, SMC and SILPA

One more attempt at blogging and I will probably continue with this at least for this summer. My proposal for this years Google Summer of Code got through and I will be writing code for Swathanthra Malayalam Computing this summer. SMC is community of open source enthusiasts interested in creating software for people to use in their language of choice. They maintain font repositories and take part in i18n of popular software as well as maintain a few projects such as SILPA, Dhwani TTS and also provide an indic webfonts service. For a full list of their activities do visit their site.

My proposal was to complete the porting of SILPA, the language processing package into a more modular structure using the flask micro web framework written in python. Jishnu Mohan is my alloted mentor for the project with Vasudev Kammath (aka copyninja) and Santhosh Thotingal acting as a secondary mentor.They are the current maintainers of the project which aims to bring language processing tools for indic languages.

The community bonding period started on 28th May and I am supposed to read the documentation and go through the source code and interact with the community members till the coding period kicks off at 21st of June.For the last two weeks I have been idling on #pocoo on freenode (these guys made flask, jinja2 and a lot of other cool python projects) and the people there seemed to be really cool and are helpful to n00bs.I have been looking at some python packaging tools, unittesting frameworks and PEP recommendations for packaging.SILPA is currently using setup tools, with the setup-tools-git extension which adds all the git tracked files into the python package without the need of any fiddling around in the MANIFEST.in file.I will be using pythons built in unittest framework, unittest to write tests for this project.I had taken edX’s SaaS class last semester,(which is a very good course, very challenging if you don’t know ruby, like me when I took the course) where I heard a lot about Test Driven Development and hope to follow some good coding practices for this project.

I have made some prototypes for the proposed template separation and hope to hit the road running when the coding period starts.Till then more code reading to get familiar with all the modules of silpa. Since I have a little time on my hands now, I have some spring cleaning to do(or rather summer cleaning or formatting my archlinux system, a new .vimrc and a new playlist).I have learnt a lot as a developper during the gsoc application period and I am sure I will learn even more.That’s it for now, the talk is done, next time there will be some code to show.

Talk is cheap. Show me the code. Torvalds, Linus (2000-08-25). Message to linux-kernel mailing list. Retrieved on 2006-08-28.