Apache Gora Google Summer of Code 2012 Application Submission

This page contains everything, which when compiled with the ideas page, will feature in the upcoming GSoC 2012 application submission.

Describe your organization.

The Apache Software Foundation provides organizational, legal, and financial support for a broad range of open source software projects. The Foundation provides an established framework for intellectual property and financial contributions that simultaneously limits contributors potential legal exposure. Through a collaborative and meritocratic development process, Apache projects deliver enterprise-grade, freely available software products that attract large communities of users. The pragmatic Apache License makes it easy for all users, commercial and individual, to deploy Apache products.

Further to this, and more specifically, the Apache Gora open source framework provides an in-memory data model and persistence for big data. Gora supports persisting to column stores, key value stores, document stores and RDBMSs, and analyzing the data with extensive Apache Hadoop MapReduce support.

Why is your organization applying to participate in Google Summer of Code 2012? What do you hope to gain by participating?

After meeting existing members of the Gora Development team at ApacheCon in November of 2011, together we decided to progress with participating in this years GSoC. As a community in January of 2012 we received that excellent news that we had succeeded in graduating from the Apache Incubator, our vision is to continue growing the community, project and of course the project functionality providing more benefits to new users. Ideally, by participating in GSoC we will be able to engage more developers and users of the Gora framework in actively driving the project direction, we are really keen to expand our support for Data Stores, GSoC will provide a platform to meet this vision.

Did your organization participate in past Google Summer of Codes? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.

Overall the Apache Software Foundation has participated in past GSoC's, however as a project Gora has never submitted an application of interest aimed at mentoring development. We are a relatively young community, only being accepted into the Apache Incubator in September of 2010, this provides justification behind 2012 being our first expression of interest towards GSoC.

If your organization has not previously participated in Google Summer of Code, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?

The Gora release champion and previous incubator project mentor Chris Mattmann has applied GSoC in the past. DETAILS

What Open Source Initiative approved license(s) does your project use?

Apache Gora is licensed under The Apache License, Version 2.0.

What is the URL for your Ideas page?

The Project Ideas page can be found here.

What is the main development mailing list for your organization?

dev@gora.apache.org, additional information regarding subscribing to the list can be found here.

What is the main IRC channel for your organization?

Unfortunately we do not maintain an IRC channel for Gora.

Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.

TODO

Who will be your backup organization administrator?

Chris Mattmann
Henry Saputra
Ioannis Canellos
Enis Soztutar

What criteria did you use to select your mentors for this year's program? Please be as specific as possible.

The choice was initially based on those that attended ApacheCon 2011, as this was where the initial participation in GSoC 2012 was discussed. Various threads expanded to construct the initial aspects and scope of the project, as existing committers and Project Management Committee members began to participated in the discussions it was then opened up to include those, who are listed above. A decisive criterion was that that mentors already play an active role within the Gora community, this is to mitigate against mentor's neglecting or perhaps not providing the relevant amount of time towards the GSoC project.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

Both Lewis McGibbney and Chris Mattmann are actively involved in the teaching and mentoring of students at Glasgow Caledonian University and University of Southern California respectively. Given the number of students available within these academic institutions we plan to arrange possible replacements should the successful GSoC student disappear.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

As mentioned above, from the original group of mentors who worked to initiate this application, we have drummed up support from within the Gora development community. Should the event arise where a mentor is unable/unavailable during any extensive duration during the GSoC project programme, there will be a replacement mentor available at short notice.

What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?

Typically we see people attracted to the Gora community through their existing interest and usage of Apache products, with a focus on indexing, persistence and analysis of big data. A pattern is emerging that people tend to stick with their preferred choice of data store and then continue to develop the matching Gora module as they see fit. The scope of the GSoC project will build on this model, allowing a student to obtain the necessary knowledge required to implement any data store they wish. This will be achieved by the student being exposed to the internal aspects of the core Gora logic, the project design and infrastructure, as well as the modular approach to testing currently implemented within the project as a whole.

Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here.