Google Summer of Code

[Richard Dale]

On Friday 16 March 2007, Alexander Dymo wrote:
> Hey!
> If you would like to participate in Google SOC and working on KDevelop
> related project it's high time to submit an application. The deadline is
> 24th March!
>
> Some ideas for KDevelop SoC projects:
> http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Summer_of_Code/2007/Ideas#KDevelop_.26_Qua
>nta Some ideas from last year:
> http://www.kdevelop.org/mediawiki/index.php/Google_SOC_2006_Project_Proposa
>ls You're of course welcome to submit your own proposal.
I think the proposal for the ruby parser/code completion is great, and I will 
be happy to help mentor that one. Here are my thoughts about other ruby 
support features for KDevelop4:

- Interactive visual irb. Like a Smalltalk environment I think ruby projects 
should be developed against an always running program. This makes code 
completion much easier as we can use ruby's runtime introspection instead of 
faking it with a combination of a static parser and guesswork. Can this be 
done if the language is text based, rather than image based like Smalltalk? 
How do we save state in between sessions?

- A better ruby debugger. The current KDevelop ruby debugger is in pure ruby 
and is very slow and doesn't work with Rails. The next one should be based on 
the C ruby-debug project and integrate with qtruby/korundum in the same way 
as the current debugger, as well as actually working with Rails.

- Support for QtRuby/Korundum Rails activeresource projects. The recent 
release of Rails allows project to be based on RESTful style where the same 
controller method can server up html, xml or rss etc formats. This means that 
QtRuby is a great way to write rich web clients that leave AJAX/Flash for 
dead if only we can have great IDE support for it (ie integrated Qt Designer, 
downloading qtruby code from the web server, graphic UI to the Rails 
scafolding etc). The Rails app on the server sends an xml message which is 
then converted into a ruby class at the client end by ActiveResource, and 
QtRuby can then use it as a basis for a Qt::ActiveItemModel to drive a 
Qt::TableView or Qt::TreeView, or forms containing Qt::LineEdit etc with data 
bound from the ActiveResource instance.

- Alternatively, QtRuby/Korundum work great with ActiveRecord and we can add 
support to KDevelop for developing database applications visually. NeXT's 
Enterprise Object Framework did this fine over ten years ago, and I would 
like to do much the same thing but with ActiveRecord. Rails is very much text 
based, and it would be nice to develop database applications 
diagrammatically.

- Combining ActiveResource with ActiveRDF, and free text indexing will allow 
new types of application to be written. I have a prolog inference engine that 
I have ported from an Objective-C one that I wrote. I think this would be a 
perfect match to extend ActiveRDF to do inferencing on SPARQRL endpoints. 
There is already a simple rule engine for ActiveRDF, but I think it would be 
much more powerful with prolog style backtracking. So this is a perfect 
student project in my opinion.

-- Richard