I am a student in first year master program in Business Administration in Romania. I am passionate about free software in general, Debian and Java in particular. I am a Debian user for some years and I want to give back to the project. I have been involved in localizing the release-notes for Lenny and Squeeze and localizing po-debconf files. I also maintain the ?NetBeans platform Romanian localization. I am using Java for some time and I wish to increase my involvement in Debian in this direction. In high-school I wrote an interpreter for a small language (code and description (in Romanian) is available here: http://ceata.org/wiki/strajer/Interpretorul_IPC). Besides my contribution to Debian I am also involved in Ceata (http://www.ceata.org). Ceata is a comunity that supports and fights for free technology and arts.

Java has made a great impact on software development. Packaging jigsaw for Debian will create a testing/developing environment for jigsaw and java modules. Having a platform like Debian that offers support for this modular JVM will increase its development speed. This is because Debian (together with it's derivatives) will make jigsaw available to a lot of users. In addition to having the modular JVM already packaged when it will be launched, this will also create know-how of modular java packaging (best practices, good and updated build/packaging tool environment, up-to-date documentation etc.).

The Java Virtual Machine is a big virtual machine will all the features incorporated in it. This Virtual Machine provides many features which are useful in only limited areas (Corba) or which are not used at all in some contexts (AWT/Swing are useless for a web server). The goal of the jigsaw project is to provide a modular JVM. This will provide many improvements in the performance area (start-up, solving of the dependencies, etc) but also the size of the dependencies. There are already some works done by upstream (Oracle) but it does not complain to the Debian standards. The target is Java 8. The goal for this Google Summer of Code project is to package the current development version of Jigsaw into Debian. Besides packaging, this project will probably implies some developments and contributions to upstream (upstream is aware of this effort).

Familiarize with jigsaw build system, Debian packaging practices for java application. Read the relevant Debian policies that regulate the packaging process. Start building the modules and check for policy conformance and bugs. Collaborate with upstream to fix possible bugs and commit patches (already on jigsaw-dev, debian-java mailing lists and irc channels). Write documentation and try to hack on javahelper to support packages 24–30 July Go to Debconf