Sameul Haque discovered the Dojo Toolkit while looking for a way to do charting in JavaScript. It's fitting that Tom Trenka, the main programmer of dojo.charting, will be his mentor this summer.

Sameul is attending the University of Alabama, majoring in Mathematics with a minor in Computer Science. His studies in Mathematics will be a great help as he builds a codebase that should end up in dojox.math at the end of the summer.

He grew up in Auburn, Alabama and will be living in Northport, Alabama this summer.

Google Summer of Code has officially begun. I have asked questions of both mentors and students and have gotten responses from many of them. I'll be posting quick write-ups for these projects. I'll also start setting up accounts for the students so they'll be able to post to this blog as things progress.

Bernado asks: "Could you give us some feedback on the final amount of applications received and what you thought of them?"

For those of you that don't know how Google's site allows us to rank projects, each of the possible mentors can give a vote between -2 and 4.

We received 17 applications. 5 of those weren't up to the standard set by the other applications and received a negative amount of votes. 5 of the other applications were relatively strong and received under 10 votes. Of the remaining 7 applications that scored 10 or more points, one of them was from the same student (which is fine, we just can't accept both) and one of them decided to accept mentorship by another organization. So we ended up with 5 pretty strong, usable applications. One of the ActiveX canvas tag projects was the 5th submission, which was narrowly edged out, probably due to concerns over ActiveX that weren't completely handled in the proposal.

We asked for 4 projects, and we got 4 projects. They are: 3d dojo.gfx library, dojo.data.Overdrive, statistical analysis package, and 3d charting. I'll be posting some profiles of the projects, mentors, and students over the next few days, along with some tales of how we ended up with these 4 projects. It should be fun!

In case you missed it, the Summer of Code deadline has been extended until noon (EST) on the 27th. Last chance!

Well, guys, the deadline is fast approaching. Right now we 6 applications, and they look excellent. I felt last year that we weren't sure what we were getting ourselves into. I didn't really know too much about the students when we were voting for the projects we were going to accept. Then again, last year, I wasn't helping organize it. It has me a little excited, really, that we can probably push out some great work this year. If you are planning on participating, you have to get your application in now.

Once applications are in, and I have everyone's permission, I'll update you on the people that have applied and probably fill you in on some of the internal debate we have on which projects to accept. Should be fun.

We've already got two applications for Google's Summer of Code. It has me a little worried about the avalanche of applications that are bound to arrive this weekend as the admission period comes to a close. If you're reading this and are planning on getting an application in, I would urge you to do it as soon as possible. We want to learn as much about you as we can in order to make the best decision possible for this summer. And remember, we have 3 questions we'd like you to answer which we've outlined in a previous post. And don't worry about having everything perfect when you apply, it's better to get your application in and allow us to tell you if we need more information.

Both applications are for dojo.data.MediaWiki, and both students seem to be up for the task. We really want to get to know our students this year, so we are requestion references for our students along with some anecdotes about their programming experience. If we're allowed to, and I have the student's permission, I'd like to share this information with the community as things move along.

Brian Skinner has put together a pretty amazing overview of his project proposals. They all focus on working with the new dojo.data module and all look to be a lot of fun.

The dojo.data module is one of the many modules available in the Dojo Toolkit. A JavaScript program can use the dojo.data module to get data from different data sources. A data source could be a simple text file, or a web service provided by a site like del.icio.us or Flickr, or a database like a relational database like MySQL, or an XML database.

I'll do my best to try to summarize these projects as best I understand them, but you should definitely check out Brian's page to get a complete understanding of these projects.

If you've had a chance to check out the Summer of Code wiki page that lists our proposed project, you might have read over some of our proposals. Today we'll look at proposals from Owen Williams, Dylan Schiemann, and yours truly.

In case you're trying to get involved with Google's Summer of Code program and are still a little bit in the dark, this is the post to read to get you on track. This should be a quick outline of the schedules and tasks that both Google and Dojo have.