3 2 1 Code in Inviting teens to contribute to open source

We believe that the key to getting students excited about computer science is to give them opportunities at ever younger ages to explore their creativity with computer science. That’s why we’re running the Google Code-in contest again this year, and today’s the day students can go to the contest site, register and start looking for tasks that interest them.

Ignacio Rodriguez was just 10 years old when he became curious about Sugar, the open source learning platform introduced nationally to students in Uruguay when he was in elementary school. With the encouragement of his teacher, Ignacio started asking questions of the developers writing and maintaining the code and he started playing around with things, a great way to learn to code. When he turned 14 he entered the Google Code-in contest completing tasks that included writing two new web services for Sugar and he created four new Sugar activities. He even continued to mentor other students throughout the contest period.  His enthusiasm for coding and making the software even better for future users earned him a spot as a 2013 Grand Prize Winner.

Ignacio is one of the 1,575 students from 78 countries that have participated in Google Code-in since 2010. We are encouraging 13-17 year old students to explore the many varied ways they can contribute to open source software development through the Google Code-in contest. Because open source is a collaborative effort, the contest is designed as a streamlined entry point for students into software development by having mentors assigned to each task that a student works on during the contest. Students don’t have to be coders to participate; as with any software project, there are many ways to contribute to the project.  Students will be able to choose from documentation, outreach, research, training, user interface and quality assurance tasks in addition to coding tasks.

This year, students can choose tasks created by 12 open source organizations working on

disaster relief, content management, desktop environments, gaming, medical record systems for developing countries, 3D solid modeling computer-aided design and operating systems to name a few.  

For more information on the contest, please visit the contest site where you can find the timeline, Frequently Asked Questions and information on each of the open source projects students can work with during the seven week contest.

Good luck students!

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

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Basic steps for upgrading source code from SDK 1 5 to 2 1 using Eclipse IDE

This is a step by step guide to upgrade one’s source code that was developed for an earlier version of android SDK, as is to work on a new version of SDK installed on your development environment



Pre-requisites:
1. You are using Eclipse IDE - Ganymede
2. You have installed SDK 2.1 on your machine
3. You have upgraded ADT to 0.96 on Eclipse IDE
4. You have pointed the Eclipse IDE to the new SDK 2.1
5. You have changed the default JDK compiler version on Eclipse to 1.6
6. You have created an Android Virtual Device (AVD) that uses the SDK 2.1 / Google API


NOTE: Upgrading SDK and Eclipse installations itself is provided in detail at http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html & http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing.html


For each project that you have in your eclipse workspace that was written for the earlier version of SDK, you need to do the following for basic upgrade (this does not include the upgrade of APIs that have be deprecated):

Step-by-step guide
1. Right click the project and go to Project Properties -> Android
2. You wil see tha right pane showing the ‘Project Build Target’
3. In this pane you will see either or both: ‘Android 2.1’ & ‘Google APIs’ depending on what you chose to install when upgrading your ADT to 0.96
4. Select Google ‘Android 2.1’ or ‘Google API” whichever is required by your earlier project (note you might have used only Android 1.5 for most projects. You would need Google API only for those projects that use google maps)
5. Then, go to the ‘Project’ menu and click on ‘clean’. Note, this is an optional step. You may have to do this if you get the error ‘Conversion to Dalvik format failed with error 1’.
6. Then, build the project by going to ‘Project’ -> ‘build’
7. You are done. You can now run the earlier Android application using the new SDK 2.1

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Introducing gRPC a new open source HTTP 2 RPC Framework

Today, we are open sourcing gRPC, a brand new framework for handling remote procedure calls. It’s BSD licensed, based on the recently finalized HTTP/2 standard, and enables easy creation of highly performant, scalable APIs and microservices in many popular programming languages and platforms. Internally at Google, we are starting to use gRPC to expose most of our public services through gRPC endpoints as part of our long term commitment to HTTP/2.

Over the years, Google has developed underlying systems and technologies to support the largest ecosystem of micro-services in the world; our servers make tens of billions of calls per second within our global datacenters. At this scale, nanoseconds matter. Efficiency, scalability and reliability are at the core of building Google’s APIs.

gRPC is based on many years of experience in building distributed systems. With the new framework, we want to bring to the developer community a modern, bandwidth and CPU efficient, low latency way to create massively distributed systems that span data centers, as well as power mobile apps, real-time communications, IoT devices and APIs.

Building on HTTP/2 standards brings many capabilities such as bidirectional streaming, flow control, header compression, multiplexing requests over a single TCP connection and more. These features save battery life and data usage on mobile while speeding up services and web applications running in the cloud.

Developers can write more responsive real-time applications, which scale more easily and make the web more efficient. Read more about the features and benefits in the FAQ.

Alongside gRPC, we are releasing a new version of Protocol Buffers, a high performance, open source binary serialization protocol that allows easy definition of services and automatic generation of client libraries. Proto 3 adds new features, is easier to use compared to previous versions, adds support for more languages and provides canonical mapping of Proto to JSON.

The project has support for C, C++, Java, Go, Node.js, Python, and Ruby. Libraries for Objective-C, PHP and C# are in development. To start contributing, please fork the Github repositories and start submitting pull requests. Also, be sure to check out the documentation, join us on the mailing list, visit the IRC #grpc channel on Freenode and tag StackOverflow questions with the “grpc” tag.

Google has been working closely with Square and other organizations on the gRPC project. We’re all excited for the potential of this technology to improve the web and look forward to further developing the project in the open with the help, direction and contributions of the community.

Post by Mugur Marculescu, Product Manager

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