Migrating Volunteer Management System to Class based views- [GSoC-16 Project]

Volunteer Management System
Systers has many volunteers that offer their skills, time and commitment to accomplish their vision- Women in Computing. The community has implemented a Volunteer Management System to manage their volunteer contact information, track hours and events they worked, and provide reporting functionality at the least.
Django 1.3 introduced class-based views and also added a range of generic class-based views. From then, function-based views have been marked as deprecated. Most of the function-based views in the Systers VMS portal violates DRY.  Class-based generic views helps to streamline common use cases, saving development time and effort.

Migrating FBV to CBV

A view is a callable which takes a request and returns a response. This can be more than just a function in Django. Class-based views allows to structure our views and reuse code by harnessing inheritance and mixins.

One of the advantages of CBV is Inheritance. For instance, large projects like VMS has a lot of redundant code due the repetition of similar views. By migrating to CBV, views could be inherited and thus avoid code redundancy.

Few advantages, which VMS can achieve by migrating to Django’s class based views are :

1. Django offers various generic views like CreateView, UpdateView, FormView, ListView and DetailView to handle views easily. For eg: Allow users to Create, Update and Delete events and shifts of volunteers with or without authorization, without violating DRY.

2. Better code readability, reducing the number of lines of code, easing the code review process.
3. Replacing the decorators by mixins instead, makes them more flexible, extensible and DRYer, just like the move from FBVs to CBVs.  
4. Better handling of form data, which is handled in a traditional way in FBVs.
5. Better support from the Django development community as the recent developments are CBV based.

Systers- A sisterhood

Systers is a forum for women who love computing. It's open for women of all ages who are into technical world. It was founded by Anita Borg with 12 other women as small mailing list. Then it grew up into a big team with the support and cooperation of other women.

The motto of the community is “increase the number of women in computer science and make the environments in which women work more conducive to their continued participation in the field.”

My experience with Systers

As an organization that take effort to bring more women into the world of computing, I am very proud to be a part of it. My relationship with Systers started as a GSoC-2016 intern. The community has always been so active with instant replies on Slack channel and showed keen interest in solving issues. They value even our small contribution very much.

I started with small bug fixes in Volunteer Management Sytem- a Django application that developed to manage the volunteers in Systers community. To get done with my first bug wasn’t easy. Struggled to understand the code base and documentation. Eventually, when the patch was merged and when I got to see the trivial contribution that I made, it was pure joy. And that’s how I started contributing to Systers.

Building a Sugar Desktop Environment

Clone the sugar-build repository from git

git clone git://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-build.git

Enter in the directory and pull the latest source code
cd sugar-build

./osbuild pull

Build the source code

./osbuild shell
build

Finally run the Sugar environment

run

You will get your Sugar environment open if there is no error.

Type Shift-Alt-Q inside sugar to exit.

Sugar for Children

Sugar IDE

Sugar is an interactive and easy to learn platform for kids. And now, coming to what is Sugar? Sugar is a free and open source desktop environment designed for interactive learning for children. It started as a part of One Laptop per Child project (OLPC) as its default desktop environment. The mission of OLPC is to develop low cost laptops and provide children around the world with new opportunities. Sugar is a free software developed under Sugar Labs, which is a non-profit organization where developers and educationists work together for the development of the software. Sugar Labs is a community that supports and promotes Sugar learning platform.

Sugar is an attractive and colorful desktop environment created with an aim of quality education for children. Sugar does not use desktop, folder or window as its user interface objects. Instead, it uses a full screen view which helps children to concentrate on one job at a time. It is developed in Python language and runs on GNU/Linux. It is released under GNU General Public License and is available in 25 languages. Most applications in Sugar are the forks of existing applications in GNOME. It is available as USB-Bootable Linux distribution and Live CDs.

Why Sugar is interesting? 

Sugar supports sharing and collaboration for users. It does not contain applications like other desktop environments. Learner applications in Sugar are called Activities. It includes activities like Pippy(introductory environment to learn Python), Journals(object and activity browsing), Distance(measure the distance between two laptops) etc which are exclusively designed for easy use for kids. In the Sugar Neighborhood view, children see their connected friends; they can join each other’s activities.

Sugar teaches you through three experiences:

Sharing, which shows the presence of others involved in the activity by sharing ideas.

Reflecting, where Sugar uses journals to record each activity of the user which helps in progress assessment.

Discovering, where users of different levels of skills join together in a single platform and go deeper and deeper with no restrictions.

Sugar provides children with the opportunity to explore, express and experiment themselves. 

References 

[1] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Welcome_to_the_Sugar_Labs_wiki

[2] http://developer.sugarlabs.org/

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_Labs

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_%28software%29

[5] https://www.sugarlabs.org/

 

Writing a simple Linux Device Driver

          A device driver is a program that controls a particular type of device that is attached to your computer. There are device drivers for printers, displays, CD-ROM readers, diskette drives, and so on.

Now let us write a simple Hello World driver code.

Create a directory anywhere in your home folder and navigate into that directory.
mkdir hello

cd hello

Create two files hello.c and Makefile

You can use any editor as you wish. Here I use Kate.

kate hello.c
Type the following code

#include <linux/init.h>

#include <linux/module.h>

static int __init hello_init (void) {

printk(KERN_ALERT "Hello World!!!");

return 0;

}

static int __exit hello_exit(void) {

printk(KERN_ALERT "Goodbye World!!!");

return 0;

}

module_init(hello_init);

module_exit(hello_exit);

Here, the hello_init() function runs when the module is loaded and hello_exit() funtion runs when the module is unloaded. Save the code.
Next we can create the Makefile.
kate Makefile
Type the follwing code in it. Make sure that you intent the code perfectly.

ifneq ($(KERNELRELEASE),)

obj-m := hello.o

else

KERNELDIR ?= /lib/modules/$(shell uname -r)/build

PWD := $(shell pwd)

default:

    $(MAKE) -C $(KERNELDIR) M=$(PWD) modules

clean:

    rm -rf *.o *.ko *.mod.*

endif

When you are done till here, we need to build the module. For that type,

make
It hardly takes half a minute. When the module is successflly built, you get a bunch of object files in the hello directory. Thus the Hello World module is ready.

Now let's see the working of the module by loading it into the kernel. Type,

sudo insmod hello.ko
This will load the module into the kernel which we can check by typing ,
lsmod
You get a list of module on top you get your hello module. To see whether the module is running in you kernel or not, type
dmesg
The Hello World message will be printed that we wrote in hello.c file
To remove the module type the following instruction in the terminal
sudo rmmod hello

Here the exit function that we typed in hello.c is run. To check the output type,

dmesg

Thanks to SSR...

            First of all, thanks to SSR Project. You may be wondering what is SSR. SSR stands for Student Social Responsibility Project conducted by our college for all third year Engineering students. We can undertake any project that is socially challenging or beneficial. We were divided into teams of six. The first idea that clicked our brain was RCC visit at Trivandrum. We were so excited to move with that idea. Next day we contacted the RCC authorities. But BAD LUCK… They are not encouraging any outsiders due to infection threat to the patients. We had to drop our project . Then the next one…. Visiting Vimala Hridaya, school for mentally challenged children. We ran up and down the college for all the formalities and permissions. Finally we were all set by one evening. But again bad luck. That project was chosen by another team. Again disappointment… Then complete silence for a few days….

Then we came up with new more ideas. We wanted to do something that will stay in future in the name of our project. That’s how we thought of Self Defense for girls, Organic Gardening and Computer Skills for students. We wrapped these ideas into one project… TOGETHER TOWARDS A BETTER FUTURE.

As usual, we started up with a group discussion. We divided our project into three parts

Nirbhaya - Self defense class for girls

Swasth - Organic gardening
Aastha - Computer skills for students

 Here our journey starts….     
First step was to get a lady who is trained in martial arts. We came to know about one from our seniors. We ran to ashram(Mata Amritanandamayi Math) to meet her.. Again the luck factor plays the role. She went to Australia, her home town. Again disappointment. But, the people in International office gave us a ray of hope. They said that there is another lady who is trained in martial arts. They took our phone number telling that they will ask her to contact us. But, still the hope was too far… We waited for next two days for a phone ring… But nothing happened. Suddenly after some days we got a call. It was her, calling us asking to meet her. The very next day, we ran to ashram with all the hopes fulfilled. But when we saw her, we were hmmmmm. She is pretty old. Her name is Ms. Nirupama. She told us that she is no longer practicing and it would be hard for her to take a workshop. But we didn't give up. At last we got a YES from her. That was great a response. We are again in ON mode.

Things became more easy after meeting her. When we told her about the other two ideas, she took us to the organic garden there in ashram and we were directed to the organic farm near the ashram beach. But we couldn't meet the concerned person over there. We were asked to come on next day. Again next day… We went there and waited around 3 hours. Finally we met Gurudas swami who is in charge of Organic farming in ashram and he provided us with some vegetable seeds and saplings. Thus the day 13th November was fixed for the project and everything was done.

On 13th November 2014

By 8:30 am we reached ashram to pick Nirupama Ma’am. She was all set. We hired an auto to Thazhava higher secondary school. By 9:45 we reached the school. We could see many innocent faces looking at us amazingly. Something that took me to my past was the sight of teachers caning the students for silly reasons. It took sometime for us to get back from our childhood days. We spoke to the principal and we had to wait till 10:30 to start our session.

By 10:30 am, IXth standard students lined up and came to the library. Library was the spot allotted to us to conduct our session. All were very enthusiastic to know what is going to happen. We introduced ourselves and Nirupama Ma’am to them. It started with a warm up. She taught the basic methods of defending, when they are attacked from behind, front and various other directions. We ourself became trainers to them repeating what she does. It lasted for two hours.They were very eager to learn more. We had a great satisfaction when we saw their interest. They really didn’t want to leave Nirupama Ma’am. They hugged and kissed her. The session got over by 12:30 pm. Then it was time for lunch. School authorities had arranged lunch for us. After lunch, Nirupama Ma'am returned to ashram.

 

Then we had Organic farming where we took a session for Viith and VIIIth standard students. We were amazed to see their interest. More than us, they shared the knowledge and experieces. We talked about chemical pesticides and the future of mankind if we continue using chemicals in food. We also discussed about why Organic farming is important. We then distributed organic seeds, saplings and compost which we collected from ashram to the students. They promised that they will surely take care of the plants.

The next agenda was Computer Skills for IXth standard students. Due to time limit, we had to stop it in one hour. We taught them basic Linux commands and how to use Linux and its features. We also talked about Cyber crimes and security.

And, thus our project came to an end. We had a great time with students. Thanks for the students who corporated with us. We understood that they enjoyed it a lot and they need more programs from us. We got a very good feedback from the students and teachers. More than a project, it was an awesome learning experience.

A great thanks to our college CIR(Corporate and Industrial Relations) and the faculty members for giving us a Social Responsibility project to learn from experiences. Though we had hurdles in the beginning, everything went well with god's grace. Now, when we think of the difficulties we had, its a great joy to cherish. Once again I would like to quote “Experience is the best teacher”.

GNU General Public License

                     GNU General Public License is the widely used license for free software which ensures the users the right to study, copy, alter and share the softwares. Softwares that acquires these rights are called Free software. This License is first released by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation(FSF) for GNU Project in 1989. This license is based on the copyleft principle. i.e, the chain of users involved should distribute their work or modifications that he/she has done to the software under the same license. It is the first copyleft license for general use.

                   The GPL accounted for nearly 65% of the 43,442 free softwares projects listed on Freecode as of August 2007 and about 68% of the projects listed on SourceForge.net by January 2006. Most widely used free software that are licensed under GPL includes Linux Kernel and GNU Compiler Collection(GCC). There are also some dual licensed free softwares like MySQL in which one being the GPL.

                  On 29 June 2007, the third new version of the license(GNU GPLv3) was released to solve the issues that GNU GPLv2 had. To keep the GPL updated, developers has the option to choose “any later version” clause. This is to choose between the original terms or terms imposed by the new version imposed by FSF. For example Linux Kernel is under GPLv2 without “any later version” clause.

Now let's see the different versions of the GPL

Version 1

                 The first version of GPL was released on 25^th February 1989. It was mainly published to prevent the restrictions that violated the definition of the Free software. The first problem that GPL solved is that, the distributors were asked to produce the human readable form of the source code along with the binaries under the same licensing conditions.

The second problem was that vendors imposed additional restrictions to the license and combined softwares with other which had other restriction on its distribution. To avoid this GPLv1 said that altered or modified software as a whole has to be distributed under same conditions.

Version 2

               According to Stallman, the prominent change in GPLv2 was “Liberty or Death”. It states that, restrictions that prevent him or her from distributing GPL licensed software in a way that respects other users' freedom, he or she cannot distribute it at all.

Version 3

           GPLv3 was released on 29^th June 2009 by Richard Stallman with legal counsel from Eben Moglen and the Software Freedom Law Center.

The major changes in GPLv3 are in relation to free software, software patents, “source code” definition and hardware restrictions on software modification. GPLv3 improves compatibility with several open source software licenses such as Apache License, version 2.0.

It was a long journey when they finally published the third version GPLv3 on 29^th June 2009.