A Toast from the Host

By Jason Robbins, Open Source Team

It's been an amazing year for Google Code's Open Source project hosting service. In 2008, our team improved the service by adding source code browsing, project feeds, project updates, a code review tool, content licenses, gadgets, better issue tracking, wiki enhancements, and increased storage quota. Check out our What's New page for further details.

Likewise, Google's own Open Source efforts expanded greatly in 2008 with new releases of everything from Chromium, V8, Android, Doctype, and Native Client, to GXP, Protocol Buffers, and tools for mocking and testing. Meanwhile, our existing Open Source efforts continue full steam on Google Web Toolkit, Gears, Guice, Ganeti, and many others. Google itself is now using Google Code to host over 200 open source projects, large and small. For the full list, just search for label:google.

However, the best part of 2008 came from you, the Open Source community. The number of active projects that we host more than doubled in 2008, everything from games to mobile to development tools. Overall participation on the site increased threefold. And our project hosting tools are now used by some of the projects that help drive the open web, such as JQuery and Firebug.

From everyone on the Open Source team, thank you for a great 2008. Keep it coming in 2009!

GeoWebCache 1.0 and Google Summer of Code

By Arne Kepp, OpenGeo

OpenGeo and the GeoWebCache team are pleased to announce the release of version 1.0 (download). GeoWebCache is a tile cache for web mapping servers designed to significantly improve the performance of your service and provide easy integration with software such as OpenLayers, Google Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth and Google Earth. The response time for cached tiles is measured in milliseconds, making it possible to serve hundreds of simultaneous clients using modest hardware.

GeoWebCache has benefited greatly from contributions resulting from the Google Summer of Code™ program. In 2007, Chris Whitney developed jTileCache, the starting point from which GeoWebCache has gradually evolved. This year, Marius Suta, primarily focused on a REST API for configuration, spent the summer on GeoWebCache, and the resulting functionality is available in our 1.0 release. GeoWebCache also underwent improvements to cache KML with support from Google's Open Source Programs Office as part of a project to enable GeoServer to make placemarks and vector data available through Super Overlays. The new Google Earth functionality in GeoServer can be seen in version 1.7.1, which ships with an integrated GeoWebCache.

GeoWebCache will continue to evolve at a rapid pace with a continually growing open source community. Planned features include the ability to let users specify what WMS parameters can be varied by the clients, so that each layer can forward filters and support multiple sets of tiles. Also, steps are being taken to enable GeoWebCache to automatically expire tiles as the data changes on the backend or styles are modified. To facilitate these features, storage of tiles and meta information will be improved. A nice, AJAX based frontend for tasks such as configuration, seeding and testing the layers is also in the works.

New File Systems Added to MacFUSE

By Amit Singh, Engineering Manager - Mac Development Team

The MacFUSE State of the Union Talk video is now available. The source code for the new file systems discussed and demonstrated during the talk is also available. Please head over to the MacFUSE source repository for the following:

• AncientFS - a file system that lets you mount ancient, and in some cases current-day Unix data containers as regular volumes on Mac OS X.


• UnixFS - a general-purpose abstraction layer for implementing Unix-style file systems in user space.


• ufs - a user-space implementation (read-only) of the UFS file system family.
  


• sysvfs -a user-space implementation (read-only) of the System V file system family.


• minixfs -a user-space implementation (read-only) of the Minix file system family.

Enjoy playing with the new file systems! We always love to hear your feedback, so please share your thoughts with us as comments on this post or in our MacFUSE Discussion Group.

C++ Mocking Made Easy

Post by Zhanyong Wan, Software Engineer - Engineering Productivity Team

Since we open-sourced the Google C++ Testing Framework in July 2008, many people have asked us when we will release a mocking framework to go with it. You asked, we listened; today we released the Google C++ Mocking Framework under the New BSD License. It is inspired by popular Java mocking frameworks like jMock and EasyMock, and works on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. More details are on the Google Testing Blog. As usual, we are eager to hear from you, so please share your thoughts with us on the Google Mock Discussion Group!

BSDers at the Googleplex

By Matt Olander and Murray Stokely, BSD Community

The meetBSD 2008 conference recently held at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, USA brought together more than 150 users and developers of the various flavors of the BSD operating system. The conference featured some great speakers, including talks by Robert Watson, Philip Paeps, Kris Moore and many others. There was also a panel to discuss the Google Summer of Code™ program, hosted by Murray Stokely and Leslie Hawthorn of Google. They were joined on stage by former mentors and students from the FreeBSD and NetBSD projects to give an overview of the program, some of the amazing results, and some tips and stories about participating. Saturday's content wrapped up with impromptu breakout sessions to discuss PC-BSD, FreeBSD, security issues, and other topics.

After the first day of the conference, attendees were taken by bus to the Zen Buddha Lounge in Mountain View for a private party to celebrate the 15th Anniversary of the FreeBSD operating system. A great time was had by all and, like most birthday parties, this one included a cake! We went a step further though: our cake was shaped like the FreeBSD logo in 3D, complete with horns. Dr. Kirk McKusick had the honors of cutting the cake and handing out a few pieces.

Thanks to help from the Open Source Program Office at Google we were able to setup a new YouTube channel for technical BSD content, allowing us to upload high quality full hour-long videos of talks and tutorials from BSD Conferences. May of the talks from MeetBSD 2008 are already available, and videos from MeetBSD 2007 and NYCBSDCon 2008 have already been uploaded. You can view these videos at http://www.youtube.com/bsdconferences. You may also want to check out photos from the conference and aforementioned birthday party.

The main conference was followed by an invitation-only FreeBSD Developer Summit which was a great success. We had over 30 attendees from the FreeBSD Developer Community as well as engineers from Yahoo, NetApp, Isilon, QLogic, Huawei, Google, Juniper, Cisco, Facebook, ISC, Metaweb, and other technology companies using or looking at using FreeBSD. There were formal presentations on the first day, followed by less structured hacking during the second day. The agenda of talks for the first day is available here.

Hard at work at the FreeBSD Developer Summit
(photo credit: Murray Stokely)