Some new about my GVFS Google Documents Backend

Just a short entry about my Gsoc project "Nautilus: add Google documents support". So as I am now in summer vacation (studying in chile for one year), I found some time last week to carry on my work on my GVFS backend. It is still missing a few things and robustness, but it hopefully should be mergeable in this cycle. Actually the reading/writing isn't fully functionnal so it's not yet open to public test.

I am now going to Brazil for vacation for one month, but I promise, afterward I will fix this issues, and then would like to find people to test it and report bugs, if it's possible ;).

Just a little reminder if anyone wants to help me developing/reviewing the backend (we never now ;) ) http://github.com/thiblahute/gvfs/tree/googledocuments

Hopping I can send you interesting news quite quickly!

My vim for android devlopement environment

I haven't blogged for a long time, and I would have liked to be able to blog about my Gnome soc project, but unfortunately, I have other priorities. As part of my studies, I had to do some development for the android platform, and since the last summer, I can't use other development environment than Vim, I decided to find a way of using it for my android project.

So here is the description of my Vim environment for android applications development. I use vim 7.2, the version distributed with Ubuntu 9.10, the Vjde plugin, terminator as a terminal (which by the way is a great terminal emulator!!) and then last android JDK in order to develop application for android2.0 (eclaire).

First I installed the SDK (there are a few bugs on the emulator installation due to this bug and an this ssl problem. I fallowed this guide to set the sdk. Then, I installed the Vjde plug-in which is a Vim plug-in to get a Java development environment in Vi, this plugin permit to add intelligent completion for methods calls as well as for imports (I only unziped this in you ~/.vim directory). Afterward, I created my android project (this page explains well how to do it). And then I created an vjde project, in vim:

:Vjdeas filename.prj

This is actually a text file which permit to save variables to you project. Then I set it Vjde to look at android class, methods and package, in vim:

:let g:vjde_lib_path='/path/to/android/sdk/platforms/android-2.0/android.jar:build.classes'

And save it

:Vjdesave

Thanks to it, I can have functions/imports completion available with the CTRL-X+CTRL-U key combination (I need to load the project(:Vjdeload filename.prj) every time I want to work on it, I think there must be a way of doing it automatically but didn't figure it out yet). It would also be possible to get the documentation integration thanks to the Vjde plugin, but I am used to have it in another window.

Then to try the program on the android emulator, I lunch the emulator, and in a terminal:

ant debug && adb install -r bin/yourAppName-debug.apk

You can then launch it in the android emulator menu (I looked for a way of lunching the program directly from the command line, but didn't find :( ). To debug the app, you can launch the ddms tool which is part of the android sdk.

I hope this could be useful for some people who want to develop for the android platform and don't want to use eclipse or netbeans IDE.

Edit: I find a good trick to manage the make and install thing, base from here. I added the following (executable) file to ~/.local/bin/vimAntAndroid:

#!/bin/sh
ant debug -Dbuild.compiler.emacs=true -quiet -find build.xml 2>&1 | grep '\[javac\]'
echo "Installing..."
adb install -r ${1} | grep 'null'
And then in Vim

set makeprg=vimAntAndroid


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:

• Libgdata master branch.
• My Gvfs branch.
• The latest nautilus and optionality my patch for a better integration of the new GVFS backend.

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.