By Zhanyong Wan, Software Engineer - Testing Technology TeamWe Googlers are quite excited about testing, but we're even more excited to share the tools we've created with the community. We've Open Sourced our Google C++ Testing Framework, Google Test, under the New BSD License. Google Test is based on the popular xUnit architecture and works on a variety of platforms, including Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and embedded systems like Symbian and Windows CE. You can find full details on the Google Testing Blog. We welcome your feedback, so please join the Google Test Discussion Group and share your thoughts with us!

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source TeamYou may recall from our previous write up that Google Zurich hosts a semi-monthly gathering of Free and Open Source Software aficionados known as the Zurich Open Source Jam. Should you find yourself in or around Zurich, Switzerland next Thursday, July 10th, you might want to stop by for the next jam, which will feature a poster session and lightning talks from local participants in the Google Summer of Code™ program. If you are a Summer of Coder or just interested in learning more about the program, please do plan to attend. You can find more information and a registration form in the Open Source Jam Zurich Google Group.

By Jason Huggins, Software Engineering Team and Selenium Co-CreatorI'm happy to announce "Selenium Ice", a new tool for developers who test web applications in Internet Explorer with Selenium. This first version of Ice is limited in scope — it simply adds a new namespace ("window.ice") to every web page, for which developers can write code in C# that is callable from JavaScript. In the future, Ice will be used by the Selenium project team as a building block for providing more native control over the IE browser process. With this native access, Selenium will be able to more reliably catch and close unexpected dialog windows, provide better information when JavaScript errors occur, or do things that require interaction with the operating system, like handling file uploads and downloads. Ice can also serve as a base for linking in faster XPath support in IE — an oft-requested feature among Selenium users.The Ice project was developed using Visual C# 2008 Express Edition, so no development licensing fees are required beyond access to a machine running Windows. There's an NAnt script for continuous integration, a WiX script for automated creation of a Microsoft Installer (.msi), and a system test script written in Python that can launch IE and ensure that the extension works correctly.The code is all Open Source and available under the Apache 2.0 license. You can check out our project site on Google Code and may want to join our Selenium Ice discussion group. We always love to hear from you, so let us know what you think of our cool new code!

By Mark Mentovai, Software Engineering TeamEven when you speak the same language as someone else, you may find differences in spelling, pronunciation, or even vocabulary. While the difference between "color" and "colour" isn't likely to confuse anyone, you might run into trouble if your audience doesn't realize that a car's "boot" is the same as its "trunk." Some of us are still trying to figure out whether we wait "on line," "in line," or whether we simply "queue up."Computer languages are no different in this regard. When you're working on a large software project, how you express something may be a vital part of the code. At Google, we've adopted a set of conventions intended to give all contributors a common coding vocabulary. This ensures that it's as easy as possible to understand code quickly when reading it, both for the original author and later reviewers. Our coding style covers many areas from formatting (we prefer two-space indentation) to use of language and library features (we only allow multiple interface inheritance, not multiple implementation inheritance).When we release our own code to the public at Google, we're not just sharing our work with the world, we begin to accept contributions to that code base from the public. Naturally, our own code follows our style guidelines, but until now, contributors to Google Open Source projects haven't had a reference for the Google coding style. This has led to frustration for coders and reviewers, and we believe that it's unfair to ask contributors to use a set of rules that haven't been defined for them. With the recent release of the Google C++ Style Guide, we're changing that.We don't think that our own style of C++ is the only way to write C++, or even necessarily the best, but we do believe that a style guide to define readability and consistency is a tool we can all use to improve software quality. If you're contributing to a Google Open Source project, you may be referred to our guide sometime soon. We're proud of our Open Source contributions, and we're glad we can make life easier for all of our community contributors.

By Bea During Open End Systems ABAs readers of the PyPy blog already know, PyPy development has recently focused on getting the code base to a more usable state. One of the most important parts of this work was creating an implementation of the ctypes_ module for PyPy, which provides a realistic way to interface with external libraries. The module is now fairly complete (if somewhat slow, but now up to only twice as slow as CPython), and has generated a great deal of community interest. One of the main reasons this work progressed so well was that we received funding from Google's Open Source Programs Office. This is really fantastic for us, and we cannot thank Google and Guido enough for helping PyPy progress more rapidly than we could have with volunteer-only time!This funding opportunity arose from the PyPy US road trip at the end of last year, which included a visit to Google. You can check out the video of the talk we gave during our visit. We wrapped up our day with discussions about the possibility of Google funding some PyPy work and soon after a we were at work on the proposal for improvements we'd submitted.One nice side-effect of the funding is indeed that we can use some of the money for funding travels of contributors to our sprint meetings. The next scheduled Google funding proposal also aims at making our Python interpreter more usable and compliant with CPython. This will be done by trying to fully run Django on top of PyPy. With more efforts like this one we're hoping that PyPy can start to be used as a CPython replacement before the end of 2008.Many thanks to the teams at merlinux and Open End for making this development possible, including Carl Friedrich Bolz, Antonio Cuni, Holger Krekel, Maciek Fijalkowski, Samuele Pedroni and yours truly. We always love to hear feedback from the community, and you can get the latest word on our development and let us know your thoughts on the PyPy Status Blog.

By Robert Konigsberg, Software Engineering Team and Eclipse EnthusiastWhat did you do to celebrate the release of Eclipse Ganymede? We celebrated by opening the Googleplex to the public and hosting EclipseDay, a free half-day conference!(Ganymede is the code name for this year's release of software from the Eclipse Foundation, based around the 3.4 platform.)I appreciated that the speakers were experts in their respective domains. Their presentations were polished and solid. The sessions covered a wide variety of Eclipse projects; including CDT, Mylyn, Equinox, OSGI, ATF and ECF; one about becoming a wicked plug-in developer; and two Google products that rely heavily on the Eclipse platform: Android and the Google Web Toolkit. The keynote, given by Michael Galpin, taught us how eBay has made Eclipse an integral and critical part of their development process.I must specifically acknowledge one presenter, Mustafa Isik (he's my former Google intern!) He, along with Scott Lewis, gave one of the best presentations of the day: "Wiring Hacker Synapses: Collaborative Coding and Team Tooling in Eclipse." If you missed the presentation, you can check out Mustafa's popular code sharing screencast. My intern's all grown up! (*sniff*)Any good trip to Google includes lots of yummy snacks and beverages. This visit was no exception!Thanks to our speakers and guests, particularly Ian Skerrett and the Eclipse Foundation. Congratulations on releasing Ganymede!

By Cat Allman, Open Source TeamWith a tip of the hat to Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter, it's a busy "while" for the Open Source Team here at Google.Leslie Hawthorn is in Durban, South Africa, speaking at the Third OpenMRS Implementers Meeting, 17-20 June 2008. The meeting is being held in conjunction with HISA 2008, the annual conference of the South African Health Informatics Association. OpenMRS is a community developed, Open Source, enterprise electronic medical record system framework, specifically intended to help those actively building and managing health systems in the developing world, where AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria afflict the lives of millions. If you are interested in Open Source health informatics and/or health care in developing parts of the world, take a look at the project.Yesterday our office in Mountain View CA hosted the Creative Commons Technology Summit. Creative Commons is a non-profit organization that builds tools that help realize the full potential of the commons in the age of digital networks. Their first technology summit brought together many parties interested in making sure "Copyright 2.0" facilitates rather than hinders innovation and the open web. The summit included an update and overview of Creative Commons technologies, panels featuring other leaders in open digital rights technologies, and a look at the future, including the role of digital copyright registries (and similar animals). Check out the online coverage, and stay tuned for the video of the event, which we will post soon.Also this week, the GCC Developers Summit, sponsored in part by Google, returned to Ottawa, Ontario, Canada for a 3 day "meeting of the minds" by the core development team behind the GNU Compiler Collection. Several Googlers presented; Vinodha Ramasamy spoke on Feedback Directed Optimization using Synthetic Edge Profiles from Hardware Event Sampling, Ian Lance Taylor gave a talk about A New ELF Linker, and Diego Novillo gave a tutorial on Tuples - A new data structure and API for GIMPLE.Next week we are hosting another conclave in Mountain View, California, USA; Eclipse Day will be held on June 24. This half day event for developers is a chance to learn about different Eclipse projects and related technologies. Googlers speaking include Sergey Prigogin on What's New in CDT Ganymede , Bruce Johnson on Tools Make the Difference: GWT in Eclipse, and Xavier Ducrohet on Android's Eclipse Toolset . Unfortunately / fortunately, the event is completely full, and registration including the waiting list is closed, so if you are not already registered you can't join us, but watch for reports on the event later next week.Also next week, USENIX Annual Technical Conference will be held in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Googler David Presotto is chairing the Short Paper Session at this venerable but always tasty technical conference.It's shaping up to be a busy summer... :)Ed. Note: Post updated to fix formatting.

By Tero Kuusela, Turuxi-vastaava, Linux-Aktivaattori ry Turuxi is the local Free and Open Source user group in the general area of Turku, Finland. We function as a working group of a nationwide non-profit organization Linux-Aktivaattori ry (in Finnish).As one of the most active FOSS groups in Finland, Turuxi's mailing list now has 56 subscribers. Our monthly meetings are regularly attended by 6-15 people depending on the topic. The topics cover a wide range of FOSS-related -- and unrelated -- stuff.Perhaps the most visible part of Turuxi's activity has been event-organizing. After our first event -- a local gathering to celebrate Debian's 10th birthday -- soon after the group was founded, we've been organizing several small events. And since 2003, we have also held yearly a larger event called "Avoimien ohjelmien päivä" (AOP for short). The name can be roughly translated as "Open Source Software Day", but in Finnish it's also a play on words about free and open attendance.The theme of this year's AOP (in Finnish) was "FOSS in professional use". The schedule was built around four presentations (some of the links in Finnish only):

• Arto Teräs introduced the many faces of Linux from mobile devices to supercomputers (slides available in english)
• Asmo Koskinen gave a presentation about the Edubuntu project
• Teemu Välimäki explained the economical and ethical benefits of FOSS to businesses
• Tommi Virtanen discussed developing for embedded Linux

In addition, there were lightning talks about various topics. And of course the 11 booths, where people from various Finnish community and business groups had many interesting discussions with our visitors and each other.We had secured a very nice place for the event -- the common ICT-building of 3 universities of Turku. We were thus hoping for a good student attendance, but unfortunately we got a murky day with some sleet which crushed those dreams. Most of our about 60 visitors ended up being FOSS users from other cities around Finland and not many fresh faces from Turku had decided to battle the weather.Google supported AOP 2008 as our first ever international sponsor. Our visitors were clearly glad of the fact, since the nice handouts sent by Google ended up being the most coveted in the event. They even sent something special for female visitors, since this year's event coincided with the International Women's Day :)We were pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm Google's Open Source team showed to support our small group's modest event. Encouraged by this experience, we're looking forward to making AOP 2009 even better -- with hopefully even stronger involvement from our new friends at Google.

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source TeamTim Ansell, Google Summer of Code™ mentor and organization administrator for the Thousand Parsec project recently visited Google Mountain View, so we took the opportunity to sit down with him and catch up with him about the universe of FOSS gaming. In Episode 17 of the Summer of Code podcast, you'll hear from Tim about the history of the Thousand Parsec project and how participating in the program has helped grow and shape the project over the past two years. Tim also shares some amazing student commit statistics as discovered while exploring Ohloh and some insights into working with universities to get more students involved with the Thousand Parsec project and Open Source.You can download the podcast in mp3 or ogg formats. Alternatively, you can subscribe to it.Many thanks to Tim for joining us for the podcast. If audio-only isn't enough to satisfy your cravings for FOSS gaming, you're in luck. Tim was also kind enough to give a technical talk during his visit and you can check out the video. In Gaming for Freedom, the latest presentation in the Open Source Developers @ Google Speaker Series, you'll get an overview of Free and Open Source games, tips on growing a gaming community and a bit more about Thousand Parsec and Summer of Code.We always love to hear from you! If there's a particular Google Open Sourcerer you'd like to see give a talk or a particular Summer of Code podcast you'd like to see us produce, post a comment and let us know.Ed. Note: Updated post to fix a broken link.

By Ellen Reitmayr, OpenUsabilityInspired by Google's Summer of Code, the OpenUsability project - an initiative to bring more emphasis on usability to FLOSS development - offers a similar student programme: the Season of Usability. The program is aimed at students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction design and has just kicked off for 2008. We're pleased to be funding 10 students focused on user experience research, UI analysis and design tasks in FLOSS projects. From May until August, the students will work closely with experienced professionals and get insights in to their way of work while improving the usability of many different FLOSS applications, ranging from instant messaging in office suites to web applications. Student participants receive a stipend of $1000 USD, kindly sponsored by Google's Open Source Programs Office, the Open Society Institute and Trolltech. We're proud to share more details on this year's student projects with all of you:Redesigning DrProject’s Administration InterfaceAlong with mentors Paula Bach & Greg Wilson, Liz Blankenship, a student of Science in Information at the University of Michigan (USA), will redesign the web-based administration interface for DrProject. DrProject is a web-based project management system and Liz will perform user research, create design solutions and test them along usability methods. Redesigning Gallery’s Image Upload ToolAlong with mentors Katrin Goetzer and Chris Kelly, Jakob Hilden will be creating and testing an improved interaction design for the image upload of Gallery, a web-based image gallery. As a first step, Jakob will conduct an expert benchmark analysis of 3 upload interfaces like Flickr and Facebook, and compare them to Gallery’s upload options. The progress is documented in Gallery's wiki. Jakob is a student of Communication and Media Science at the University of Michigan (USA). Improving Jeliot User Interface and WorkflowsAlong with mentors Roman Bednarik, Andres Moreno and Niko Myller, Sharad Baliyan will perform a user interface redesign and analyse cross cultural issues in Jeliot, a Java Program Visualisation application. Sharad, who studies Interaction Design at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad (India), will be helping make Jeliot more usable for teachers and students of Computer Science, who use this tool to visualise how a Java program is executed and interpreted step-by-step. Human Interface Guidelines and Design Patterns for KDE4Becca Scollan, a student of Science and Information at the University of Baltimore (USA), and Thomas Pfeiffer, currently studying Psychology at the Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany), will team up to complete the Human Interface Guidelines and define interaction paradigms for the Linux Desktop environment KDE. They will serve as a reference for developers and help them to develop more consistent user interfaces. Their mentors for the project will be Celeste Lyn Paul and yours truly.Toolbox and Palette Interaction for KOfficeAlong with mentors Celeste Lyn Paul, Ellen Reitmayr and Boudewijn Remp, Neha Pahwa will analyse the interaction paradigm of four core applications of the KDE Office suite - KWord, KPresenter,the image manipulation application Krita, and the vector graphics application Karbon. Currently studying Information Technology at the Rochester Institute of Technology (USA), Neha's plan is to interview the developers to identify the major project goals and target users as a first step. 3d Widgets for MakeHumanMakeHuman is a 3d modelling software, which Eugenio Passacantilli, currently studying Science in Communications at the University La Sapienza di Roma (Italy), will focus on for Season of Usability 2008. Along with mentors Stefano Fabri, Manuel Bastioni and Simone Re, Eugenio will perform a usability study of MakeHuman’s 3-d interaction elements that have recently been added. The progress can be monitored in the MakeHuman blog. Handheld-Mode Interface for the OLPC XO LaptopsMentors Eben Eliason and Marco Gritti will oversee this project with an eye to the final goal of producing specifications for handheld interactions for the OLPC desktop. As a first step, Alessandro Vona, student of Science in Communications, will analyse various handheld devices and their input methods to gain an understanding of some potential challenges as well as some potential solutions. Improving HDR imaging with QtpfsguiAlong with mentors Roman Bednark, Giuseppe Rota, and Alexadre Prokoudine, Vladimir Smida will optimise workflows and improve the usability of different tools in Qtpfsgui, an HDR imaging application. Vladimir is currently studying Computer Graphics at the Brno University of Technology (Czech Republic). Instant Messaging and VoIP with SIP CommunicatorMike Oren, who is also working toward his Doctorate in Philosophy at Iowa State University (USA), will spend the next few months working on the usability of SIP-Communicator, an instant messaging and VoIP client. Under the tutelage of Raphael Wimmer and Emil Ivov, Mike will focus on integrating multi-protocol features into a unified UI. As this is a major issue with various multi-protocol IM applications, his work will probably apply to other IM apps like Kopete and Pidgin, as well.Many congratulations to all of our student participants and many thanks to all of our mentors for helping to make the Season of Usability 2008 a success!

By by Juha Kärkkäinen, Visiting Researcher and Stefan Burkhardt, Software Engineering TeamToday we've released dcs-bwt, a C++ implementation of a data compressor based on the Burrows-Wheeler compression technique. The compressor is intended for experimentation with different algorithms and parameter combinations.To support experimentation, the compressor has a modular structure that separates the Burrows-Wheeler transform stage from the compression stage. There are multiple algorithms for each stage and new algorithms can be added with minimal changes to the existing code. Any combination of algorithms and their parameters can be chosen at run-time.The compressor contains a high-performance implementation of an advanced algorithm for the Burrows-Wheeler transform stage. (The "dcs" in the name stands for Difference Cover Sampling and refers to this advanced algorithm.) It can efficiently handle blocks of hundreds of megabytes even for highly redundant data. The use of very large blocks improves the compression rate dramatically in some cases.We hope you'll find dcs-bwt useful. Check out the code and let us know what you think, either in the dcs-bwt Google Group or the comments section..

By Michelle Murrain, Coordinator - Nonprofit Open Source InitiativeOn June 5, 2008, a new model of technology training was tried out. It was inspired by the "unconference" and "camp" models of technology conferences, and we called it an "untraining." It was designed to be created by the participants, where they would work together to learn what they needed to know.The software was OpenOffice.org and the setting was Central Park, in Google's NYC offices. It was organized by the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative and sponsored by Google's Open Source Programs Office. Many thanks also to our friends at Aspiration for their generous in-kind support of the event. The participants were mostly a mix of librarians and non-profit folks.The day was, in the view of the participants, a qualified success. They learned a lot about OpenOffice.org, got just about all of their questions answered, and forged new alliances in the process. There were a few tweaks that the participants suggested at the end of the day, which they felt would make the model more useful; they suggested that the structure of the day worked well, with three sessions completely defined by the participants. They also suggested an addition of a set of concrete tasks that were sent ahead of time, where people could choose the tasks more connected to their own set of uses for OpenOffice.org, then one or more of the groups could use those tasks as organizing principles.There was a short OpenOffice.org and Open Source 101 class at the beginning of the day to orient everyone. Also, many notes were taken during the event, so if you would be interested in organizing an Open Source untraining, check the wiki for inspiration.We were really happy to get to try this model out, and happy that Google helped us to get more people up to speed in using the great open source tool, OpenOffice.org. Plus, we learned a lot about a good training model for applications of this sort, and we hope to use this model again in the near future.