Piccolo is Open Source software.  While people at the University of Maryland are actively developing Piccolo, we continue to rely on you, the wide range of Piccolo users around the world to help with their development.  There are several ways you can help us out.

The simplest way to help is to use Piccolo and let us know when you find problems, or have suggestions for improvements.  We are using the piccolo-bug mailing list to manage bug reports.  Be sure to submit complete information that we can use to duplicate the bug, including a complete description of the problem, the version of Java or .NET you are using and the OS you are running on.  Also include standalone code if at all possible so we can duplicate the problem.

The next way you can help Piccolo development is to contribute code.  If you find a way to improve the implementation of a method, or you find that Piccolo is missing a class, then write it!  Send the code to piccolo-chat to share it immediately with the Piccolo community. There are a number of examples of code that people have contributed this way that has ended up in the Piccolo core.  These contributions are immediately added to the code base, available through anonymous SVN, and then included in the next release.

Or if you want to add a new widget, code example, sample app, etc., you can add it to the user contributed directory within Piccolo.  Email piccolo-info with the info below to get write access to this subdirectory of the distribution. There is a "Piccolo User Contrib" directory in the .NET version and a "usercontrib" directory in the Java version.  Any code that you contribute should follow these guidelines:

• Add your code in a new subdirectory of the appropriate user contributed directory.
• Put all your code in the Java package edu.umd.cs.piccolox.uc, or the C# namespace UMD.HCIL.PiccoloX.UC.
• Use standard javadoc or C# documentation, detailed description of use, a main() method with a very simple demo.
• Use the same BSD license as regular piccolo to avoid complication
• Include your name and contact information

Getting Write Permission to the User Contributed directory

You need to send us the following encrypted name/password information to give you write access to the user-contrib subdirectory of the Piccolo SVN repository.  You must specify a username starting with "sv-", and run htpasswd on a unix box to generate a password and mail us the username and password. If you don't have access to a machine running htpasswd, you can try a public service such as http://www.xs4all.nl/~remcovz/htpasswd.html .  If you do have htpasswd, you can use it like this::

     htpasswd -n sv-someone
     New password:
     Re-type new password:
     sv-someone:1jZ4WjDvJdjuE