martes, 18 de agosto de 2009

Gsoc: add google documents support to nautilus

During those 12 weeks of my Google summer of code, I have hacked mainly on 2 gnome project which are gvfs and libgdata.

Concerning libgdata, I added the google documents service and it's now in the master branch, it's functional even if there are still a few bugs.

As far as gvfs is concerned, I have an alpha version of the gdocs backend which isn't really usable for final users yet, but don't worry I am going to make it working well in the coming weeks! All the functions are implemented, I need to stabilize it and optimize it in order to hopefully get it merged in gvfs.

I have also worked a little bit on nautilus to support the new backend (almost nothing).

some screenshots:



If you anyway want to give it a try (I think you should wait a few weeks more), you will need:

miércoles, 5 de agosto de 2009

First post: My google Summer of code project and my future in the gnome comunity

This is my first post on a blog, I decided to write now about my Gsoc project, "Nautilus: add support to Google documents" because it's almost the end of this project and because I decided that I want to carry on this work. As you may have heard about, this project consist in adding the possibility to nautilus users to use their Google documents as if they were local documents so it mean that they should be able to use it with any office application suite such as Open-office, Goffice... This will permit users to always have their documents synchronized on the web and to be able to access it on-line (throw the Google website) all the time even if they can manage it very easily from their computer and use it with their favorite software.

To complete this project I had to work on three different gnome project which are:
  • Libgdata: A Glib base library which permit to handle Google services. I needed to hack on it to add the Google documents services. The service is now implemented and available in the master branch of the git repository.
  • GVFS: the gnome virtual file system. I needed to add a Google documents backend which permits to handle the Google documents with any program using it. I now have a branch accessible here. It is not finalized yet but in a good way. I will need some review in the coming days ;)
  • Nautilus: done, patch available here.
I think I will use this blog to talk about my gnome hackes and I won't stop working on gnome after my Google summer of code since I enjoyed a lot the work I did so far and even if I couldn't be at GUADEC this year I wish I could next year ;)

I first want my Gsoc project to be integrated in gnome (maybe 2.30/3.0? would be great for me ;) ) I know I need to get it working perfectly before, and to polish it a lot... but I will do it. I also will add some feature such the possibility to access documents off-line and synchronize it when the user get connected. And maybe more when I get more ideas!

And afterward I have some other projects such as the creation of another backend to access Google Picassaweb pictures, I actually have thought my actual Backend so it will be more simple to integrate this other one.