The Google Summer of Code 2008 is Over

Accoding to the schedule, the coding period of this year SoC came to an end today. A happy ending for most projects, including mine :)

No, no, it wasn't just a happy end -- it was completely awesome. I'm talking about the whole experience, not just the results (which I think are really good too, but this is something that other people must also judge). The exchanging of ideas, experiences, and even small-talk with very smart and enthusiastic people which is a lot of miles away, but also working quite closely with you is very unique. You learn a lot. And not only strictly technical things. Just as an example, my English is now way better than a few months ago.

If you are a student, and like open source, you can't miss the opportunity to write a SoC proposal and go for your project, if you haven't already done so. Really, you can't.

For some reason, is in this exciting moment when you look behind and start to think about how rich this experience was, when you also say thanks. It just feels natural, so here I go.

Thanks to Google, who made this possible. Thanks to the Google Open Source Staff, the people who made this possible.

Thanks to Jim Baker, my SoC mentor. Not only strong on the technical aspect, also on the motivational one. Not to mention that he is always full of ideas. If you are a student on a future GSoC and Jim says that he wants to mentor your project, just do it. You won't look back. [Note that this means that you are likely to work with Jython. You may want to start looking at it early ;-) ]

Thanks to the Jython and Django developers, for accepting me and my patches :-). No, seriously. Jython developers gave me a lot of trust when I was accepted as a committer, and that speed up the process considerably. And Django folks even while busy fixing/implementing/reworking hundred of things in the rush for the 1.0 release, were able to keep Jython (and alternative Python VMs in general) among its priorities for the this release.

Thanks to Imagemaker, my current employer, who were very kind and let me work part-time for all the SoC coding period. It's still a small company, but it is growing quite fast. I hope it remains cool while continuing growing. If you are a programmer working on Chile, you may want to look at it. Hey!, if you are a student and want to work here and also participate in a GSoC, now there is a also precedent ;-). Talented people is certainly welcomed here.

Last, but not (in any way!) least, thanks to my family. I doubt they are going to read this, but I have to admit that I've been very absent on the last months. Thanks for their understanding. And for being there in those moments when I wasn't absent :).

Deploying Django/Jython Projects on a J2EE App Server

Now that Django runs on Jython out of the box, you may wonder: "How do I deploy the resulting project into an application server (Tomcat, GlassFish, JBoss, etc)"?

The answer:

~/myproject$ jython25 manage.py war \
             --include-java-libs="/path/to/my/jdbc-driver.jar"

Providing that you have the latest svn revision on django-jython, and you have included 'doj' into your project INSTALLED_APPS, it will just work.

Then you drop the WAR file (generated in the parent directory of your project) into your application server, and that's all. No need to install Django or Jython in the target server. The WAR is completely self-contained.

If you are interested on Django/Jython, give this a try! And for more information, see the WarDeployment page on the django-jython wiki.

Django on Jython: It's here!

That's true: Django works on Jython without any special patch!

For anyone interesting in trying it out, I've written the steps on the Jython wiki.

For Jython, I think this is great. Not only showing that it is alive and well, but also to expose how much progress has been done in almost every front. Better unicode support, an improved parser, setuptools compatibility, performance improvements, experimental system-restarting support, datetime and decimal support on zxJDBC, are some of the features that enables this milestone. Looking back, it is a lot of impressive work of all Jython developers.

For Django this is great too! I think the codebase got improved by some of the changes that were needed to enable Jython support, and this sort of confirms Django as the web framework that every Python platform want to get running (Jython, PyPy, IronPython... not to mention AppEngine). I'm also amazed at the response we got from the Django developers. They managed to include the needed changes in the middle of the rush for the 1.0 release. Amazing.

For me... well, I'm very, very happy. It has been a lot of fun so far, and there will be more of it. Did I mention that I will be speaking at DjangoCon on a few weeks? ;-)

Moreover, there are 4 days left for the GSoC coding period, and I have another objective to meet. Stay tuned...

Update: And here is the other goal completed: Deploying Django projects on Java App Servers.