For the second year in a row, I have the privilege of being a Summer of Code mentor for Ruby Central, the US-based organisation responsible for the promotion of the Ruby language and the parent organisation for both the International Ruby Conference and the International Rails Conferences.

Summer of Code 2006 was the first time that Ruby Central had an opportunity to participate in the Summer of Code. I gave a presentation to the London Ruby Users’ Group last summer and compiled data about our applications:

• There were 17 volunteers (mentors).
• We received 96 applications.
• We deemed 84 applications eligible (that is, on-topic to Ruby).
• We had 25 applications that we wanted to support (someone volunteered to mentor).
• Google granted Ruby Central 10 applications.
• There were two drop-outs by the mid-term, leaving us with 8 active applications.

Of the eight that were left, I believe we had most or all of them complete the work in the summer. I was a mentor for Alex Bradbury’s ARIEL library—and I’ve seen that people have used it since, which makes me really happy.

This year, we had 35 mentors judging 41 applications. Thirty-eight project submissions were initially deemed eligible. (One other was later deemed ineligible because the student had submitted two projects and we wanted the student to choose between the two projects.) Of these 38 applications, we had 16 that people indicated that they would be willing to mentor, and Google has granted us 14. If the students and mentors are willing, you will be reading periodic progress updates from these students on this blog. Without further ado, here are the students, their projects, and the mentors under the Ruby Central banner this year, in no particular order:

• Framework for ETL and Data mining operations in Ruby
  by Swanand Janardan Deodhar, mentored by Shashank T. Date
• Matrix module extensions/Various functionality extensions to Ruby’s Matrix module
  by Bonchis Cosmin, mentored by Maurice Edward Borasky
• dcov - Ruby documentation coverage analyzer
  by Jeremy McAnally, mentored by Chad Fowler
• Ruby on Rails load tester plugin
  by Zachary Coburn, mentored by Scott Laird
• Cover the core of Ruby with RSpec
  by Pedro Del Gallego Vida, mentored by Johnathon Hornbeck
• A Recorder/Code-Generator for FireWatir
  by Helder dos Santos Ribeiro, mentored by Aaron Patterson
• Apotomo: Model-Driven Development Kit for Rails
  by Nick Sutterer, mentored by Patrick Hurley
• Write a Ruby parser in ANTLR 3.0
  by wang haofei, mentored by Xueyong Zhi
• Constraint programming in Ruby
  by Andreas Erik Johan Launila, mentored by James Edward Gray II
• A protocol framework for EventMachine
  by Selem Delul, mentored by Patrick Michael Eyler
• Extending Debugging Capabilities for Ruby on Rails
  by Minciu Dumitru Eugen, mentored by Steven A Bristol
• Rubyland: Extending Desktop Applications with Ruby
  by Scott Ostler, mentored by Austin Ziegler
• RSpec suite for Ruby implementations
  by Florian Gross, mentored by Marcel Molina
• Atom Publishing Protocol Support for Ruby + Rails
  by Gerrit Kaiser, mentored by Benjamin Joseph Bleything

There’s a lot more details behind the links for each project. I’m really excited about all of the projects this year, not just the one for which I am a mentor. Congratulations to the students: you’ve done a lot of hard work so far. Be ready for even harder work this summer—we’re all excited by your proposals, and we’re ready to help you make them happen.

If you want to read more about Ruby Central’s participation in the Summer of Code, check out our page. It’s even worth looking at what the other organisations are doing—this is going to be one hot summer!