Alright.  The planning continues.  On the OpenSocial end of things, I am in the process of signing up as a developer on both MySpace and Orkut, hopefully granting me access to their sandboxes/development platforms from which I can experiment with a few lightweight and utterly harmless test gadgets I've written to start feeling out the OpenSocial capabilities.  Aside from an application to Google's Friend Connect service, that end of things is pretty much out of my control until I've been granted developer access to these social networking sites.

On the Joomla! end of things, I have 1.5.3 up and running on my local test server, and I've started poking around with the extensions a little to get a feel for how they integrate with the core and interact with the application on a whole.

I also have pages upon pages of documentation for both software packages printed, indexed, organized, and cited in a binder I have put together specifically for this summer's GSoC work.  Everything is readily available and easy to reference, even in the extreme and highly unlikely case (though this has happened before) where I am entirely cut off from the internet for long periods of time; I will still be able to continue my development work.  Even better, I can highlight and underline and write notes in the margins, not to mention draw up diagrams and situate them right next to relevant papers.

In my next post I will hopefully have news about developer status on a social networking site, but for now I'd like to delve into the specifics of how I intend to tackle this project from a logistical standpoint.  As mentioned in the comments of my previous post, this is certainly an ambitious endeavor.  It is entirely plausible to accomplish, especially since the development platform and aplication release aspects, two sides of the same coin, complement each other, and in tandem will create a more complete and robust deliverable.  In order to do so, however, a great deal of planning and organization is required.

With that in mind, I am going to spend tomorrow ensuring that I have all the necessary logistical framework in place.  This includes, but is not limited to, Eclipse plug-ins: Web Tools and Subversion plug-ins must be installed and functioning correctly, both on my desktop and my laptop.  Furthermore, I will be setting up spreadsheets to identify and track individual tasks to be accomplished over the summer, and divide those tasks up according to weeks and hours.  Weekly updates will be implemented to track progress: what tasks were planned to be finished, which tasks were actually finished, which weren't and why and how many more hours are required.  I will create burndown charts to measure the total estimated hours to completion versus the total hours completed in order to ensure that project development is on track.  I am going to treat this project as timeboxed; that is, it is due by the end of the GSoC.  No extensions.

If I run into problems with time, functionality will have to be cut in order to trim the number of hours remaining to match with the impending deadline.  On Saturday of each week, I will submit a progress report with all this information to some central repository that is TBD.  All the progress reports, graphs, templates, and deliverables will be available at this location (though my mentor may want me to submit these materials somewhere else too, such as J!'s Subversion repository. Nevertheless, a little redundancy can only help).

Hopefully, I will receive notification of having attained developer status by the time I have finished putting this framework in place, at which point I can begin working with my mentor to draw up a feasible development plan.  Stay tuned.