Post-GSoC2009 Era

I was glad to hear that my branch will be merged to the trunk soon, enabling Unicode for Windows. September 15th, Abiword 2.8 will be released. It seems, Abiword 3.x series will come soon, hopefully. I am currently having a handful of patches to commit to my branch, and fine-tuning them before committing.

Arabic testing was really useful to me. English testing was obviously not useful, since I am dealing with Unicode characters. Croatian testing gave me some hints fixing Cyrillic text bugs. Tamil testing was having some issues, as ta-IN localization is still half-completed, and hence producing English dialog boxes. Arabic was amazing with its RTL text. Arabic is 99% localized. So it pointed me all the bugs and omissions in the port.

After committing the fixes to all the known issues, I will stay with my branch awaiting the merge. :)

GSoC - Firm Pencils Down Date

Today is the firm pencils down date, and I just completed the evaluations. Arabic, Tamil, and Croatian were used in testing. Arabic testing was really cool, which pointed me the bugs, being a unicode only - BiDi text (Arabic/English). Of course, we will continue as committors to Abiword, working with our projects.

The student - mentor map for Abiword can be found here.

My SVN branch can be found here.

My important commits are listed here.

My Student Project Page in Google.

Bug 10616, Bug 1625, and some more are fixed now, in my branch.

Most of these bugs will be fixed after the merge of the branch.

VirtualBox OSE and Audio

My Windows XP guest operating system on Ubuntu Jaunty host was not giving any audio output. I checked the Settings of the VirtualBox OSE, and in the Audio Settings, it was set to Host Audio Driver - ALSA Audio Driver and Audio controller - SoundBlaster 16. I changed those parameters to PulseAudio and ICH AC97, and restarted Windows XP host machine. Wow.. all the audio applications on my Windows guest is playing cool now. But I tried to play an audio clip on my Ubuntu host. Alas! No sound in my Ubuntu host now! I shut down the Windows XP guest operating system. Then all the audio applications were running as usual in my Ubuntu host operating system.

I tried to start Windows XP guest while listening to an audio clip in my Ubuntu host operating system. A warning appeared as the Windows loaded and Windows started, yet again with no sound at all. Hence I came to the conclusion that, currently for my host/guest operating systems combination (Ubuntu Jaunty / Windows XP), audio will be available either to guest or host, but not to the both at once. Seems this bug is found and reported in VirtualBox OSE bug databases when I did a google search for this.

An update: Recently I was able to get the audio in both the host and guest simultaneously, without any further modification. I guess, at that time some other processes were blocking the audio sharing between the host and the guest.

Summer of Codes - Wrapping up

Google Summer of Codes 2009 is reaching its finishing touches. I should thank Google for organizing the event and Abiword for mentoring me. 'Porting Abiword for windows to Unicode', is my project. My focus was, in simpler terms, to provide an Arabic [Unicode] Abiword in Windows. I mean, my testing language was Arabic, thanks to the fact, it is good for the testing of BIDI text.

My mentor dom, the administrator hub, cross-building robsta, the MSVC abicollab and Abiword releases uwog, Windows maintainer sum1, ryanp with documentation and plugins, and msevior... I have to thank these developers for the support they were providing to me and the other participants. A wonderful job, they are doing, at Abiword. By providing a friendly, yet challenging learning environment, Abiword enables us extending our commitment to Abiword.

The Abiword development will not complete with this GSoC - All the successful Abiword students will continue being Abiword Commitors. The next mile stone release 2.8 is the major focus now. Later the SoC codes will be merged from trunk and further modifications will be done. Finally before the merge to the trunk, a merge from trunk to the branch will happen once more to our SoC branches.

It should however be noted, we all prefer not Windows, but FOSS Operating systems (or more specifically, Linux). As a 'cute' word processor, Abiword runs everywhere, literally. So we still feel free to develop for Windows and Mac, when it comes for Abiword. FOSS will rule the world.

"Abiword -- It's cute."

Design Constraints : Mooshabaya

August 6th [WSO2/Denis, Pradeeban, and Supun] : Discussion on the design constraints of Mooshabaya : [10 a.m - 11 a.m]

Security: MyProxy is currently used in XBaya. WSO2 Identity Server will be used in Mooshabaya, where OpenID will be provided to ensure the security. Users from Registry will be initially added, where in the later stage of the development, WSO2 identity server will be merged with WSO2 Registry to provide users with secure access.

XSUL: Currently the Jython Scripts and possibly the other code segments depend on XSUL libraries. Since XSUL is obsolete and substituted with its better alternative Axis2, we will consider adding the Axis2 libs and avoid XSUL code segments in the coding. Later we will consider removing the XSUL dependencies altogether from the Mooshabaya code base.

GFac: Gfac is used, as when it is used to host the descriptive language script (similar to wsdl, but with the business logic and further data, possibly), the services can be used, even without running them. This will reduce the overhead of running each of the service, otherwise. This GFac integration scenario into XBaya also will be considered on a later stage of development.

Operating System: XBaya runs on windows, Linux, and Unix variants, while some other Extreme! Labs components run only in Linux and Unix variants. Mooshabaya will [hopefully] run in Windows, Linux, and Unix environments.

The current interface which has two implementations which are used to export the workflows as Jython Scripts and BPEL. Initially we will implement the Mashup Generator parallel to these two implementation, where finally the Mashup Generator code will be used to depict the workflows, in Mooshabaya.

These meeting entries are also listed here, in Moodle.

Supervised By:

Mrs. Vishaka Nanayakkara

Dr. Srinath Perera

Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana

Group Members:

De Alwis, K.D.B.C. 060081B

Malinga, A.S. 060286H

Pradeeban, K. 060372T

Weerasiri, W.A.D.D. 060527B