Open Recall: Mozilla, jQuery, AppScale, WordPress and GSoC
Open Recall is a space on The H for those things that are too small to package as news but are worth covering. In this edition, SourceForge offers Google Code downloads, Mozilla add-ons and Firefox 25, jQuery's latest refresh, AppScale updates, WordPress is ten and Google Summer of Code is go.
- Google's announcement that it would no longer be hosting downloads from Google Code has prompted SourceForge to announce a welcome to Google Code users. In the same way that it supported GitHub projects when they lost file upload and download features, SourceForge says it is offering unlimited bandwidth and analytics to projects, even if they only need to host binary files.
- Mozilla's add-ons team offered a heads up on what's happening with add-on compatibility in Firefox over the next six months running up to October's planned release of Firefox 25. As Firefox 24 is planned as an extended support release, major changes have been pushed to Firefox 25 – the Australis look and feel as well as changes to session restore handling mean that a number of add-ons will break.
- The jQuery developers shipped jQuery 1.10.0 and 2.0.1 simultaneously last week as they continue to synchronise the 1.x and 2.x features. The updates bring more relaxed HTML parsing, improved modularity and "no more IE9 focus of death". Download details and release notes are available.
- The AppScale developers shipped an update to their open source implementation of Google's App Engine platform. Among the many enhancements, the Java support handles multithreading and the Mail and Channel APIs. Source and images for VirtualBox, KVM and Eucalyptus can be found on the company's download page.
- WordPress is ten. The WordPress blogging platform has just celbrated its tenth aniversary. Going forward, the developers are looking to release WordPress 3.6 soon and announced 8 interns who will be working on WordPress over the summer as part of the Google Summer of Code (see below) and the GNOME Outreach Program for Women. Matt Mullenweg, who developed WordPress and founded Automattic, the business behind WordPress, also offered some thoughts on ten years of open source blogging.
- Google's Summer of Code (GSoC) heads into full swing as 1,192 students have been accepted out of 4,144 who applied. Students will now begin "bonding" with their mentors and projects and make preparations for June when they begin actually writing code with one of the 177 organisations involved in GSoC 2013.
(djwm)