Mid-terms for Google Summer of Code 2008 are upon us. We have 19 students and over 40 mentors working tirelessly to bring you fantastic code ranging from new design tools, to fantastic new APIs, to improvements to existing modules such as Views and NodeQueue. Read on to meet the students behind SoC, and actually test out preliminary alpha versions of their projects yourselves! Make sure to log feedback to the projects' issue queues. :)

For more information about Summer of Code, see the SoC 2008 group on groups.drupal.org.

Allister Beharry, who hails from Trinidad and Tobago, is studying for a B.A. in math and linguistics from the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine. This is his second year with Drupal in GSoC; last year he contributed the DAST project.

Project: Views DatasourceTry it out: download | demo

Anshu Prateek A final year student of engineering @ NIT Trichy, India. This is his first SoC with drupal. More about him @ his blog

Project: OpenID Attribute Exchange Implementation with DrupalTry it out: download | demo

Aron Novak. A third year computer science student @ BME. He has a Hungarian-only blog. At the summer he should do some social network research beside SoC.

Project: New Aggregator for Drupal coreTry it out: download | demo

Blake Lucchesi, a recently graduated Electrical Engineering major from University of California, Irvine is a second year SoC Student continuing work on Drupal's search capabilities. This year's project relates to enhancing Drupal core search module's result rankings. Blake is also an active member of the LADrupal group. Read more about Blake and his Drupal work at his website.

Project: Search RankingTry it out: download

Carson Lam is a second-year computer science major at UBC. New to Drupal, he is creating a time-oriented booking system for booking resources such as rooms or rentals.

Project: Bookings API and Public BookingsTry it out: Bookings API | Public Bookings

Christopher Bradford attends VCU in downtown Richmond, Virginia as an Information Systems major. He was introduced to Drupal last year as a SoC student working on the BitTorrent module.

Project: Document Import APITry it out: download | demo

Craig Jackson is a student of Salt Lake Community College, and will be transferring to a university soon. I started using Drupal when my employer wanted me to remake their website in Drupal, nearly a year ago. I created my own site in Drupal 6 (Fans Scorecard) back in February right after it was released. I also love playing guitar, so feel free to come lay down some riffs with me.

Project: Validation APITry it out: download | demo

Dario Ghilardi Student of Information Security at University of Milan, this is my first gSoC for Drupal.

Project: Security Scanner component for SimpleTest module.Try it out: download | demo

Ezra Barnett Gildesgame Ezra Barnett Gildesgame is pursuing his undergraduate degree in Psychology with a focus on Cognitive Psychology at the New School University in New York City.

Project: Smartqueue per-User and Smartqueues for Organic Groups.Try it out: Smartqueue Users | Smartqueue OG
(requires the latest version of Nodequeue.module)

Gurpartap Singh is a 2nd year student for Bachelor's degree in IT, and hails from Punjab, India. Prime interests in Drupal core and contributions development include usability, etc. changes to improve user experience; Help system improvements being on hit list this summers!

Project: HelpTry it out: download | demo

Jimmy Berry is a former GHOP superstar based out of Omaha, Nebraska. When not working on his SoC project, he enjoys helping to drive Drupal's testing efforts.

Project: Usability Testing SuiteTry it out: download | demo

Joakim Stai (aka. ximo) is a chimp from Norway. He enjoys making frontend goodness, developing modules and improving usability. The Icon module combines all those interests.

Project: IconTry it out: download | demo

John Snow is a computer engineering major at Utah State University. John's project will allow sites to create widgets from Drupal content. IFrame and Google Gadget widget formats are planned as a part of SoC. An API is also being created to allow other modules to create widgets and for additional formats to be added easily. Read more at his website.

Project: Embed widgetsTry it out: download | demo

Joshua Rogers, is finishing his B.S. in computer science from Jacksonville State University This is his first year with Drupal in GSoC; though he highly hopes that this won't be his last.

Project: Plugin ManagerTry it out: download | demo

Kyle Mathews is a Masters of Information Systems student at BYU. He's keenly interested in technology that helps groups work together. More about Kyle on his blog.Projects: Memetracker and Machine Learning APITry it out: download Memetracker/MachinelearningAPI | demo

Miriam Sexton is a computer science student at UMBC, and is blogging at her demo site. She is enjoying working her project and thinks it's great to be paid and given help for something she'd be doing anyway. Image_Overlay will allow users to draw on top of images and edit these drawings. See her the wiki page for more information.

Project: Image Manipulaton GUITry it out: download | demo

Sumit Kataria is a 3rd year computer science student from India with prime interests in web development. Find more about him and his project @ his blog and LinkedIn pro.. He is working on OAuth an open source authentication protocol's Integration to Drupal and Services API. Its his first year with SoC and Drupal - He is very happy as he made summer of code with Drupal.

Project: Integrating OAuth open source protocol to Services API in DrupalTry it out: download | demo

Thomas Seidl studies Computer Science, where he has just completed his BSc, and Engineering Physics at the Vienna University of Technology in Austria. It's his first SoC and he's just started this year with participating in the Drupal community. Details about his project can be found at his wiki page.

Project: Improving the Apache Solr Search Integration moduleTry it out: download | demo

Tony Narlock Tony Narlock is a student in the Chicago Suburbs. He's working on improving the color.module for the next version of Drupal. His passion stems from building web templates since the web 1.0 and having to make sure that having color-enabled themes is easier for theme developers.

Project: Improving color.module for Drupal 7Try it out: download | demo

Check out ongoing progress
at http://groups.drupal.org/soc-2008!