Googles Summer of Code

I return from my blogging grave, all muddy handed. Rargh.

Ok, so lets get the news I’m most excited about out of the way first – I got accepted into GSoC! MusicBrainz have been very supportive through the process providing me with a lot of feedback to get my proposal as useful as possible. But what is my proposal, you may be wondering? Essentially, I’m going to take the first step in moving MusicBrainz to a framework, by introducing templating (something that is saddly long overdue).

We’ve chosen to stick with Perl, despite ideas of Python being thrown around simply because we don’t have enough time to undertake such a huge port. I’ll be using Template::Toolkit as the templating library which provides some very nice features that I tend to take a shine too – support for plugins and filters, a clean syntax, support for basic control flow (but nothing you can get too carried away with – a Good Thing) and something that looks very clever – data & code binding.

Summer of Code has only just begun so naturally I don’t have anything to show. However, I can’t sit around doing nothing so I have 2 Perl books on my desk at the moment that I’m working my way through. I did have a basic understanding of Perl before, but I want to do this project once, and do it right. At the same time I’ve been fiddling with Template::Toolkit and am currently writing a little bit of stuff to help generate GreaseMonkey scripts (more on that later).