And rejected... once more

That's it people. The Free Software Competence Center was rejected once more as a mentoring organization at Google Summer of Code. Therefore Archimedes will NOT receive fundings to contribution projects. Back on lonely development for another year. Sorry people.

Another news is that I have a 3 graduation students and 3 masters students team starting to work on Archimedes next week. They chose to continue the Rich Client development which means I will keep the non-RCP version going by myself.
The bad part of this is that it will evolve slowlier but the good part is that the RCP version might reach a very good state by the end of the semester if everything works fine. Our plans are to implement the intersection features in order to have snap, trim, extend and other intersection dependent features in the RCP version.

Another good news is that I've hired Dreamhost to host a couple of sites related to my family. Those are my mother's french litterature site (http://www.maremurex.net) and my father's architecture office site (http://www.bacco.com.br) that we are rebuilding on rails. I will migrate all Archimedes resources and infos to Dreamhost when I get some time. This will mean a new website for archimedes with a much better system (that I hope to build) than the one on sourceforge or the incubadora. This blog will also be migrated there whenever I get some time. I'll post a warning here when I do migrate it.

Next post coming up is about my current work on screencasts for Smalltalk, Squeak and Seaside. See you soon.

Archimedes and GSoC

Hi again,
Like last year, I will register Archimedes in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC). This time I hope the server will stay online so that the evaluators can take a look at the project. As last year, Archimedes will be inscribed as one of the projects of the Free Software Competence Center in São Paulo. I am not sure this is really a very good idea since it will not display Archimedes in the main project lists (since it will be considered a sub project). On the other hand, Archimedes, as well as other projects in the Competence Center may benefit from "partial" votes that may result from proposals to the various projects.

The due date for the registration is next week (wednesday, 12th march) but I already started listing possible subprojects for Archimedes. So far, I have listed the following projects:

• Implement a DXF and DNG importer and exporter
• Implementing the printing configuration and viewing system (a.k.a layout)
  
• Creating an improved layer table widget to allow property modifications in the toolbar's combo and implement the line style creation/edition system for those layers
  
• Improve the performance of the current snap system and intersection to handle over 1000 elements on screen without any noticeable lag
  
• Implement another view system to match the Microstation's interaction pattern
  
• Implement a DWG importer and exporter

I've tried to make projects equally interesting and work demanding (which explains why DXF and DNG make one project while DWG alone is another). If you have any other suggestion, requests or ideas, please let me know. I will try to gather them (or break them) into projects the same size as these ones.

Last thing: I've updated the developer's team on SF. All developers I removed haven't coded one single line in the last year and showed no interest about keeping the work going. There are now 3 developers listed there including myself. They haven't coded much lately but they promised they would do their best to restart contributing. It is a bit more fair to see the project having 3 developers instead of 10. Explains more the lack of advance.

Bye bye!