GSOC 2015 wrap-up

The 11th year of Google Summer of Code comes to an end.

In April, we accepted 1,051 university students from 73 countries. These students wrote code for 137 mentoring organizations. We also had 1,918 mentors from 70 countries help them out.

Unfortunately, I haven't kept close enough records, but I believe this was my 7th year of participating in GSoC, although one year doesn't count because I messed up the paperwork.

This year, Abhinav Gupta and I worked together on some very interesting and complex projects in Derby. Notably:

• We addressed several security vulnerabilities in the Derby XML processing logic, which could be exploited by malware to attempt information disclosure attacks on computers running Derby software. (DERBY-6807)
• We re-designed and re-implemented the data structures and algorithms which Derby uses to track which columns in which database tables are referenced by the database triggers that are in effect. This became more complex recently when Derby added support for trigger "WHEN clauses", which introduce new opportunities for database table references to need to be resolved during trigger execution. (DERBY-6783)
• We re-factored the DRDA exception-passing logic in the Derby client-server libraries so that client and server code could cooperate on the encoding of exceptions without needing to duplicate code in the underlying code base. As a result, we added the ability for Derby to throw Derby-specific sub-classes of SQLException with additional information available for user applications to access. (DERBY-6773)

I really enjoyed working with Abhinav on these projects, and I hope he enjoyed learning more about Derby and more about the Open Source development process.

And thanks again to Google for your support of this program.

Eleven years, wow!