Dear Supun, Welcome to the Velocity community! You've probably already heard that your application for Google Summer of Code 2007 has been accepted.
As your official mentor I'm sending you a public welcome note and ideas for getting started. (I'll send you a smaller private note with personal contact info as well). I send this publically as I hope you will build a relationship not just with me but with the entire developer community. A little bit about me. I work in San Francisco, California for a small startup of which I am co-owner, Forio Business Simulations. (www.forio.com). We sell a product and hosted service which enables third parties to create a specific type of web application (business simulations) for their clients. Velocity is a key part of our platform with hundreds of users uploading their own dynamic web pages marked up with a Velocity-based language. My involvement with the project started in 2002 when I got frustrated with some missing pieces of the language. First I complained. Then I wrote a few patches. Most notably, I helped add decimal number support to the library, added new event handlers, and wrote a security-oriented introspector. While I waited for the patches to be reviewed and committed, I became active on the user lists answering questions. Eventually I was given committer privileges and became interested in the project beyond my immediate needs. Several other new committers were added around the same time, and we applied to become an Apache Top Level Project (TLP). As a consequence of all the above, this part March the project issued the first new release of Velocity in 3 years. Back to topic... This is my first time mentoring, so appreciate any advice from you as to how I can be supportive as we go along. My two big suggestions are (1) stay in touch and (2) stay public. In other words, don't hide away and code, but instead send regular updates and ask lots of questions. If you are going to go away (holiday, family, etc) for a while, let us know. Also, please involve the entire community by using public channels whenever possible. Correspond on [EMAIL PROTECTED] Submit patches and comments on issues via JIRA. And feel free to be involved with other aspects of the project (e.g. answering user questions on [EMAIL PROTECTED] if you feel inclined). I also want to note that your proposed project consists of a number of mostly independent pieces. I encourage you to do them one at a time and keep them all separate when discussing and when submitting patches. This simplifies discussion and makes it easier to review code. Also, we're very religious about code style and about unit tests. Every new feature or bug fix will need a unit test in order to be committed. Here's a couple of specific suggestions I have for you to get started. I note that the official coding period doesn't start until May 28. (1) Subscribe to the dev and user mailing lists. http://velocity.apache.org/contact.html (2) Introduce yourself on the dev list. Where do you go to school? How'd you start using Velocity? What do you plan to do first? (3) Checkout the latest Velocity engine code base with svn if you haven't already http://www.apache.org/dev/version-control.html (4) Read these guidelines for community and coding standards. http://wiki.apache.org/velocity/GettingYourPatchCommitted http://wiki.apache.org/velocity/CodeStandards http://wiki.apache.org/velocity/DocumentationGuidelines (5) Pick one aspect of your project, and jump in! Welcome again Supun -- look forward to working with you over the following few months. Best regards. WILL
