The Summer of Code has finally come to an end, and it's time for me to write up my final thoughts on my involvement in it. The Import / Export API module has been a long and challenging project, but it's also been great fun and has, in my opinion, been a worthwhile cause to devote my time to. My mentor has given my work the final tick of approval (which is great!), and I personally feel that the project has been an overwhelming success.
In a small, poorly ventilated room, somewhere in Australia, there are four geeky fingers and two geeky thumbs, and they are attached to two geeky hands. All of the fingers and all of the thumbs are racing haphazardly across a black keyboard, trying to churn out PHP; but mostly they're just tapping repeatedly, and angrily, on the 'backspace' key. A pair of eyes squint tiredly at the LCD monitor before them, trying to discern whether the miniscule black dot that they perceive is a speck of dirt, or yet another pixel that has gone to pixel heaven.
The Summer of Code is now past its half-way mark. For some reason, I passed the mid-term evaluation, and I'm still here. The API is getting ever closer to meeting its success criteria, although not as close as I'd hoped for it to be by this point. A very crude XML import and export is now possible, but the ID and reference handling system - which is set to be one of the API's killer features - is only half-complete at present. Unfortunately, it's going to stay that way for a while, because I'm away on vacation for the next full week.
The mid-program mentor evaluation (a.k.a. crunch time) for the Summer of Code is almost here, and as such, I've been working round-the-clock to get my project looking as presentable as possible. The Import / Export API module has made significant progress since my last report, but there's still plenty of work left to be done.
It's been almost two weeks since the 2006 Summer of Code began, and with it, my work to develop an import / export API module for Drupal. In case you missed it, my work is being documented on this wiki. My latest code is now also available as a project on drupal.org. Since I've barely started, I think that this is a stupid time to sit back and reflect on what I've done so far. But I'm doing it anyway.