Hello, all

[Frank Osterfeld]

Hi Micah,

On Friday 17 June 2005 06:33, wyldeone wrote:
> My name is Micah Wylde, and I'm interested in helping out with the kde
> project, either directly or indirectly through one of its apps. I'm a
> high school student, and pretty proficient in C++ and have some
> knowledge of QT. Are there any applications that currently need help?

Great that you want to contribute to KDE, I guess a lot of apps could do with 
more man-power :) It's probably the best to work on something one is actually 
interested in, scratching your own itch. But of course that's up to you.

As I am the maintainer of Akregator I would be happy if I can persuade you to 
help in the Akregator project: ;-)

Akregator (http://akregator.sf.net), a news feed reader being part of KDE-PIM, 
needs a new RSS/Atom parser, supporting RSS 0.9x/2.0, RSS 1.0, and Atom (0.3 
and, as soon as released, 1.0). The old one is knewsticker's librss with Atom 
support hacked in, lacking features and being a bit buggy.

The new one should provide complete one-to-one representations of every format 
(RSS2Document/RSS2Article, AtomDocument etc.) and a unified and simplified 
abstraction for use in Akregator, so Akregator does not have to care about 
format details.
It would work like this: If an RSS 2.0 feed is fetched, RSS2Parser parses it 
and creates a 1:1 representation, RSS2Document. Then, some "RSS2Mapper" would 
map the RSS2Document to the abstraction, Akregator::Document or similar.

A first step would be to create the format specific parsers, creating the 1:1 
representations. This is pretty much straightforward most of the time, a bit 
more tricky only when it comes e.g. to handling the multiple ways of 
encoding the article content in RSS [1]. Well, no fear, we limit the 
brokeness of feeds we support, so fixing broken XML etc. is not needed.

This task needs C++, Qt and XML knowledge (no guru skills in any of them). 
Deep knowledge of KDE architecture or Akregator internals is not needed (for 
the parser classes, only a very few KDE functions are needed, like for 
parsing dates etc.)..
I have a first (mostly untested) parser implementation for RSS 0.9x/2.0 around 
that can be used as basis.

If you are interested, let me know.

[1] http://virtuelvis.com/archives/2004/03/11-ways-to-valid-rss


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