Daniel Brookshier's Blog

March 2005 Archives

New Projects in the GELC

Four new projects in the GELC to challenge your thinking. This week we have some high performance computing, a computer algebra system, a resource for Brazilians, and a venture into the hospitality arena to create a room rental system. Take a look at the projects, listed below, and join them if you are interested. If they get you thinking about something different, please propose your own project for the GELC. We are looking for education and research projects plus projects to be used by teachers and students to learn almost any subject.

lionra
owner: sprhodes@dev.java.net

The project is aimed at developing a library and framework for implementing Distributed Threads in Java. Lionra Threads, is the implementation part of a research project being conducted as part of a class at Wake Technical Community College's program in High Performance Computing. There is a little bit of code written, but it's barely more (right now) than some example code from a basic book on RMI, and an Ant build script. There is also a blog where Phillip Rhodes the talks about this project quite a bit (along with a lot of other cruft, of course), and a website with some links to related material. To learn more about this project, there is an abstract from the first draft of the research paper that goes along with the project.

cas
owner: afishionado@dev.java.net

CAS computer algebra system - prototype of a Hartmath-based (http://hartmath.sf.net) computer algebra system

javabr
owner: jpriori@dev.java.net

A java web source for Brazilians programmers.

JRoom
owner: lordbit@dev.java.net

The purpose of this project is to study Java technologies and develop a project with room rental service for companies.

Project Jatse - An open source set of tools for teaching, learning and playing with algebra.

Project Jatse, owned by Eric Brown-Munoz is an open source (Lesser General Public License) set of tools for teaching, learning and playing with algebra. The goal is to provide a broad range of symbolic algebra functionality that is missing in the open source community.

This project is targeted at the mathematics used in high school, although these classes can be extended to cover either more or less advanced math. The project is currently in its initial release on java.net and the working applet can be found here: http://jatse.dev.java.net/prototype.html

Jatse is a new project within the Global Education and Learning Community (GELC). It has swiftly made progress and has graduated from the GELC's incubator to the Tool For Teaching section of the community. To kick off the graduation of this project, I asked Eric Brown-Munoz for some info about himself and Jatse:

Tell us about yourself

I am currently working for The Concord Consortium to develop applets that support an innovative algebra curriculum. This involves building mathematical models with several views to give students insights into the underlying mathematics.

The grant I am working under is coming to an end. I would love to hear from anyone who is looking for an experienced educational programmer. Previously, I worked in many aspects of the software industry-- starting with phone support and moving through quality assurance and tools development. I also spent three years teaching high school science.

What school are you associated with?

I hold a B.S. degree in Physics from the University of Massachusetts.

Why did you start this project and what is it about?

Educational software needs good symbolic math tools. Most software uses numeric algorithms even though students do math symbolically in the classroom.

I started working in this direction in my current job, but I want to go much further than the grant I am working under needs.

What is the status and further plans for this project?

There is a pretty good Expression tree that can represent and evaluate arbitrary algebraic expressions. This is the heart of this project. I wrote a prototype GUI. This is based on one approach to teaching algebra which focusses on expressions as objects. There are also two packages, polynomial and render, that are the foundations for features I am working on for the futures. These are in progress.

All of this Code is currently available in CVS.

I plan to create three products...
- A library of useful classes based around the Expression Tree.
- A set of applications to meet educational needs.
- Resource materials to make these useful to students and teachers.

What kind of help are you looking for?

I am very interested in finding developers who would like to collaborate on this type of software. I would love to form a team to make software that is useful and cool.

Specific needs are:
- Good programmers with a strong interest in algebra education.
- People with user interface design skills.
- Someone with parser experience.
- People with educational design experience.

Where are you located?

Cambridge, Massachusetts.

New Open Source Projects in the Global Education and Learning Community (GELC)

We have four new projects in the Global Education and Learning Community (GELC). This time we have a prompter system for English and Turkish, healthcare framework, a simulation of Unix, and a remote desktop controller for a J2ME cell phone. Take a look at the descriptions below and click on the links to join these projects and help out.

BelletMen - An English-Turkish Prompter System

javahealth - A framework and toolset to facilitate building healthcare-related applications. Includes a library to manage healthcare concepts and processes and an architecture to build information sharing applications, as well as some basic (but functional) implementations.

JEmuX attempts to be a simulation of a common UNIX environment that runs as a normal Java application. JEmuX's mission is to become an application that behaves like a user-space UNIX system, where users can execute ordinary operations and tasks, use and manage their files and devices as if they were on UNIX. This project has born exclusively for hobby and fun, with particular attention on trying to reproduce UNIX behaviour using OOP approach. It could be also useful for people who might like to have a glance on how a simple UNIX system works, just to discover a new and "unknown" environment. It's console-based and looks forward to modularity, so that it could be easily enhanced with new issues that come to mind.

remotecontroller - To develop a J2ME application which works as Remote Control for a desktop PC/notebook.

zemberek - Turkish NLP library and Turkish Spell Checking

Zemberek is one of the very interesting projects oriented around the Turkish language and subjects like Natural Language Processing and even spell checking for Turkish. This open source project is something we really like seeing here within the Global Education and Learning Community (GELC) because of its international base. I talked to the owners about themselves and their project.

Tell us about yourself

Ahmet Akin: I am an Electronics and Communications engineer. I worked in very different areas, in brief and historical order: Modem manufacturing and test (boring), Embedded system design with microcontrollers and early Smart cards, CAD software development in C++, Technology Newspaper editor, Long time embedded hardware and software development with C, Cryptology, web based design with php :) and at last, my long time dream, Java development. My current emplyer is Softek Inc ( www.softekpr.com ), I work as a researcher there. I do like java programming, photograpy, chess and table tennis. The other owner of the project is my twin brother, he graduated from the same university but Computer Engineering department. We worked in the same place for almost 5 years, but his job is mostly software related. He is currently working in National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology. I graduated from Yildiz Technical University Electronics and Communication Engineering in Turkey. I finished my master degree in the same university Communications department. I always had a weak point on software, so I started my doctoral study in Istanbul Technical University Computer Engineering with the purpose of working on Natural Language Processing subject.

Co-Owner: Mehmet Dundar Akin, has a BS degree from Yildiz Technical University and MS degree from Istanbul Technical University in computer Engineering. Currently he is working as senior researcher for National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptography in Turkey.

What local Java user group are you associated with if any?

I moved to Puerto Rico one and a half year ago, and sadly Java is not so popular here in business environment (MS - Visual Basic Island). But I consider myself lucky because I use Java at work, I met Java programmers and my supervisor is a real Java guru (Victor Salaman) and I have learnt a lot from him. I still consider myself as a Java apprentice (my code says the same :)

Why did you start this project and what is it about?

Well, almost five years ago, I was interested in Mozilla project and I thought it would be cool to implement a real time spell checker for Turkish Language in it. Then I started to think how would it be and noticed that making a spell checker for Turkish is extremely hard. The deeper I go into the subject the more interested in Natural Language Processing subject I became. I started a C++ project for the spell checker, and my first prototype miraculously worked. After 3 years and several changes in my life, with the help of my brother (who is a good Computer Engneer with very good Java knowledge) I decided to make the project alive again. But this time, we made a decision and rewrite the whole project in Java. It was a real breeze after C++. Seriously the difference in ease of development and deployment is huge, without sacrificing performance.

We started a project in Java.net with the name of Tspell (the original name of the C++ project too). Our scope was broader, we wanted to make a base for all kind of Turkish related computing and NLP problems. After almost one year, project was able to make Turkish spell checking, morphological extraction of the root and affixes of words, word suggestion for wrong word, and deasciifying texts written without using Turkish specific characters. Then we changed the project name to Zemberek (Means main spring of clock) because "TSpell" was not Turkish and users did not like that. Now we also provide the first open source Turkish Spell checker for Open Office project and it works successfuly.

Zemberek is the only open source project in its area and we are proud of it. It bacame a part of the first product of a Turkish national Linux Project: Pardus (http://www.uludag.org.tr/ ). We will also made a presentation in a very important event, the Open Source Days in Istanbul BilgI University about the project. (http://open.bilgi.edu.tr/freedays/program.php?lang=en )

What is the status and further plans for this project?

Although I still see the project in its infancy, project is very active and it is almost usable for real life applications, Open Office plug-in is the proof of it. We also start developing a server project based on the core library. Server will hopefully provide language related services to other applications, such as Mozilla and KDE. However, for us, there are a lot of work to do. Honestly right now Zemberek is still not doing serious "NLP" jobs. I can say it has a relatively simple structure and parsing mechanism is not really difficult. But after stabilizing the spell checker we will hopefully move on to more complicated and intresting subjects. Such as creating an open source wordnet for Turkish, sentence analysis, grammar checking, statistical analysis, maybe voice applications (TTS, Recognition, with the help of Free TTS and Sphynx4 libraries), translation, SQL with natural language, Shell commands with natural language, etc. Subjects in NLP are endless and when it is about Turkish there are very limited work available ( we know that in several universities in Turkey, there are advanced work available on the subject, but there are not many implemetation is available, especially in Java)

What kind of help are you looking for?

Of course, like all the other projects we are looking for developers. Currently only two people are actively developing and it is really not enough. Unfortunately we cannot receive much help from international Java developers because of the nature of the project. So we are hoping that more help will come from Turkish Java developers. Knowledge related information is also crucial and project other members are helping. Also we need linguists, experts in Turkish language and general Language subject. NLP expertise is another .Turkish Linux communities helped a alot when we introduced Open Office plug in.

Where are you located?

Amet lives in Puerto Rico in the rural area near the city of Canovanas. Mehmet Dundar Akin lives in Turkey.

This is for us to do a better job: What do you think about the GELC and the java.net community, any suggestions?

The GELC and java.net is great. I mean I really wish java.net would have started earlier. The services are improved nice and the projects in GELC are interesting. I know some NLP projects exist but since our main interest is Turkish I couldnt examine them in detail. Suggestions, you should make yourselves more visible in educational environment. In schools MS is trying hard to lure the students, I think java.net, and Sun in general should be doing this, because java's potential is much better. Also maybe contest like events can be created.

Project profile: Liber - Projects for Electronic Documents, human interface, and information retrieval.

Liber is a research laboratory at Pernambuco's Federal University developing projects focusing on Electronic Document Management Systems, Human-Machine Interface, Information Retrieval, and Data Integration. Liber has four major projects: Macunayna: a multimidia EDMS, The Pernambuco's Annals: a textual database created using PostgreSQL and Jakarta Lucene; Theses: compilations from theses and dissertations (like NDLTD) made at Pernambuco's Federal University and Sonora to deals with sound files.

I asked Marcos Silva Pereira about these projects and himself.

Tell us about yourself.

My name is Marcos Silva Pereira , 25 years old, and I am coursing Computer Science in Computer Science Center at Pernambuco's Federal University. Nowadays, I have involved with Liber, a research laboratory that do academic research about Data Integration, Digital Libraries, Metadados and others.

Also, I am one of the JavaFree's administrator, a brazilian virtual JUG. I am a Open Source enthusiast and have involve with OpenNuke, a Nuke based upon PHPNuke completely written in Java. My hobbies are, cinema, music, photography, books, beach, and cartoons.

My projects in Java.net:

liber.dev.java.net

pereira-costa.dev.java.net
opennuke.dev.java.net
javafree.dev.java.net

Liber is a research laboratory at Pernambuco's Federal University developing projects about EDMS (Electronic Document Management System), Human-Machine Interface, Information Retrieve and Data Integration. Liber have four major projects: Macunayna: a multimidia EDMS, The Pernambuco's Annals: a textual database created using PostgreSQL and Jakarta Lucene; Theses: compilations from theses and dissertations (like NDLTD) made at Pernambuco's Federal University and Sonora to deals with sound files

What school(s) are you associated or graduated from?

Computer Science Center at Pernambuco's Federal University

Why did you start this project and what is it about?

I start it because Liber aims to be a open source laboratory and we believe that this, Open Source, is important. The project is related with research areas at Liber.

What is the status and further plans for this project?

All project are started and some will have a release coming soon. The further plans are improve documents, create friendly installers and have a active community.

What kind of help are you looking for?

Discussions about system architeture, best pratices, patterns, simplicity, english language and do professional development.

Where are you located?

City: Recife
State: Pernambuco
Country: Brazil

Looking for Tapestry Examples? They're here in the Global Education and Learning Community

Tapestry seems to be one of the latest technologies coming out of the Apache/Jakarta community that is gaining steam. Tapestry lets you build web applications with objects, methods and properties instead of URLs and query parameters. But like many open source projects, it needs a little help. In order to fill the documentation and understanding gap, John Reynolds (johnreynolds@dev.java.net) started the TapestryWebComponentExamples project in the Global Education and Learning Community (GELC).

I talked with John about himself and his project. Here is what he had to say:

Tell us about yourself

I have an MSCSE from the University of Texas at Arlington, and a BSEE from Rice University in Houston. I've been a professional programmer/development manager/architect since 1980.

What local Java user group are you associated with?
Austin Java Users Group

Why did you start this project?
I published some Tapestry examples in my blog, and the feedback was very positive. Setting up a place for people to share examples seemed like a good next step.

What is the status and further plans for this project?

Keep adding examples as I get time.

What kind of help are you looking for?
I'm looking for folks to "adopt" specific Tapestry components, and add examples for those components.

Project Profile : JActionGroup2 a project for J2EE, Spring and other technologies plus Chinese translations

JActionGroup2has several different aspects from rapid development with J2E to using the Spring framework for presentation, an information platform using Spring, Ibatis, and Webwork. It also includes an all-purpose ACL model with AOP , web layer caching with caching (on Webwork). On top of all this, because the owner is in Shanghai, there is a translation of documentation from English to Chinese. They also have a larger web site with a lot of related information at http://www.jactiongroup.net

JActionGroup2 is hosted by the Global Education and Learning Community (GELC). It has swiftly made progress and has graduated from the GELC's incubator. I asked one of the project owners,Roger Ye, a few questions about himself and the project.

Tell us about yourself.

Well, I'm Roger Ye(laurince@dev.java.net). I have a Bachelor Degree, majored in Computer Sci. & Tech and my employer is Wuerth Phoenix (Shanghai).

What school are you associated or graduated from?

HUST (Huazhong University of Sci. & Tech. China)

What is your project about?

It's for the translation of the Spring Reference Documentation into Chinese, I'm interested in the Spring framework and want to donate to the community.

JActionGroup2 include two projects :

ShareJ will build a platform that that is used to share java projects for excellent technology or ideas. The platform includes open information management and articles as web components which base on Spring and Hibernate.

Spring aims to translate the Spring Framework reference into Chinese. The completed spring-reference 1.0 version was released at the Spring Chinese forum. Now we will revamp the project by converting to Docbook and use version control.

Please visit our site by http://www.jactiongroup.net for more information with the project and other information on Spring and related technologies for Chinese developers.

Where are you located?

Shanghai, China

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.