A Zesty Summer

On Canada’s west coast we have been having an unbelievable summer.

While the sunshine (and the beach) have a tendency to lure me away from my computer, there has been so much Eclipse activity this summer  that it’s challenging to get away.  One of the things I’m most excited about is the Google Summer of Code work going on in Zest.  Zest is my small graph widget toolkit.  Up to now it has been something I’ve worked on in the evenings and weekends.  However, this all changed when not one… but two students signed up to work on Zest.

Mateusz Matela, has ventured into the world of Zest layouts.  I wouldn’t ask my worse enemy to look at the layouts, but Mateusz managed to refactor the entire package, removing much of the dead (and error prone code) and he came out with a much cleaner (and simpler) design.  Mateusz even managed to fix some bugs along the way.  For the rest of the summer, Mateusz will be adding some new widgets to our library, allowing you to expand and explore complex graphs.

Fabian Steeg has be working on a GraphViz to Zest transformation toolkit. Using this toolkit you can write GraphViz and generate Zest diagrams.

This is done by using a GraphViz DSL (thanks to the oAW team for this great work) and set of Java Emitting Templates.  Fabian also has full text editor for GraphViz and custom builder that will generate the equivalent Zest code.

Fabian has also been working on the reverse transformation (Zest to GraphViz).

I’m not sure how Zest ended up with two of the best Summer of Code students, but I’m very excited about the future of the project.

Great work guys!