Late last month (the 26^th to be precise) marked the end to this year's Google Summer of Code, so it's been a time for evaluations and for looking not only to the past few months but also to the future. The first bit was taken care of with the GSoC 2011 Results article published over at the Haiku site, detailing which projects passed the final (four of them) and which unfortunately didn't. You have all the details in the above linked piece, but the projects which passed evaluation were:

• Mike Smith's additions to VirtualBox™ are already meeting or exceeding usability expectations.
• Nathan Heisey brought our support of SDL up to the version 1.3. Haiku is also really thankful for the collaboration we had from the SDL project having Ryan 'icculus' Gordon co-mentoring this project.
• Gabriel Hartmann provided Haiku with a USB video driver for high-end webcams. His work has already found its way to Haiku's source tree; while not perfect yet, it should prove to be a good starting point for incremental work onward.
• Sean Healy's project will enable 3rd party projects to access Be/Haiku's API with other langages than C++, namely Python and Perl.

Great work from these students but congratulations are due for all of them.

Along with that piece, we've had individual updates from 3 students. The first one to write it was Barrett who worked on the Contacts Kit. Although he unfortunately didn't pass the final evaluation, he intends to keep working on the project which I'm sure we all agree it's great news.

Next came scgtrp who's project, VirtualBox Guest Additions, passed evaluation. His work is already being used by several Haiku users and from what I've read, they're quite happy with it. As Barrett did, scgtrp plans to keep working on it in the future.

The latest update came from the Batisseur project, under the responsability of JRabbit. Not to break the pattern, he too will keep working on his project and on Haiku, planning to improve it and bring even more tools over to Haiku.

Pass or not, all deserve recognition and congratulations for their work. Well done.