Ben Ripkens

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Participating in Google Summer of Code 2011

Last year I heard about the Google Summer of Code - a project that gives students the possibility to flip bits instead of burgers, i.e. Google enables students to work on open source software. Since then I have been planning to participate in this project and I’m happy to say that I got accepted!

Over the next three months I’ll be working on a JavaScript visualization library for interactive reaction graphs. The organization is the Theoretical Biophysics group of the Humboldt University (Berlin - Germany). Describing what I’m going to do is kinda complicated and I’m sure that I couldn’t explain it anyway (at least properly). Therefore just imagine client side (browser) rendering and modification of these diagrams.

In my application I summarized it the following way:

Currently no library is available for client side visualization of reaction networks. As a result a JavaScript library for interactive reaction graphs is to be designed and developed. Besides presentation the framework should provide functionality for scrolling, dragging, zooming, modification and export to JPEG, PNG, SVG and PDF.

I’m planning to post a bunch of blog entries during that time to document the whole experience. So if you are interested in this you should bookmark / subscribe to my blog.

That's me, Ben.
Hey, I am Ben Ripkens (bripkens) and this is my blog. I live in Düsseldorf (Germany) and I am employed by the codecentric AG as a Software Engineer. Web application frontends are my main area of expertise, but you may also find some other interesting articles on this blog.