Diving into Soylent (and Gnome)

As this is my first post on Planet Gnome (and also Planet SoC by the way) I’d like to take the chance to introduce myself: I’m Sven Pfaller, a 21-year-old computer science student from Erlangen (near Nürnberg), Germany. In the scope of this years’ Google Summer of Code I work on Soylent, more precisely on libsoylent, a library that will try to integrate people deeper into the (Gnome) desktop. If you want to know more about the project, you can have a look at a previous blog post I have written some time ago. So, hello everyone, nice to be here .

The last 6 weeks…
… or “the community-bonding-period”

So, what happened the last weeks? I was busy learning many things, digging through tutorials and writing some sample programs. I’ve put together a list of all tutorials and documentation I studied so far. The first items on the list I found really usefull for entering and exploring Gnome:

• Gnome Programming Guidelines
• GTK+ / Glib Tutorial
• GObject Tutorial
• D-Bus Tutorial
• Telepathy API Reference
• Mission Control API Reference
• Empathy API Reference
• libebook Tutorial (from Maemo)
• Autobook for Autotools
• vCard Specification

Much stuff, isn’t it? The sample programs I wrote include a simple GTK+ GUI, a GObject based mini-game, D-Bus and libebook utilities, and ChabChab, a command-line instant messanger. I am amazed of the capabilities of the Telepathy / Mission Control / Empathy trio, as I was able to write a solid IM in almost no time.

Last week…
… or “the start”

With all the things listed above I felt well prepared. After adjusting the SVN repository’s autotools to include libsoylent (outch, pain!) and carefully going through the complete existing Soylent code, I started to write down my thoughts about the libsoylent API. Presumably a first public draft will be available by the end of this week.

There’s still much to do and I am slightly behind my schedule, so I better get going .