[Rkward-devel] Contributions/Tips

[thomas]

Hi!

> In my "spare" time i'm a web developer and unix/linux admin with 7 years of
> experiencies/love_for. I'm not a C++ developer but a PHP coder that for my
> thesis develop a groupware for survey management and real-time stat/graph
> production. This "game" teach me on a lot of things.. especially boxplot,
> multi-boxplot and so on.

Those skills might come in handy at some point in the project.

> On RKWard: I'm thinkin' on the same project and some time ago I realize
> statistika.sourceforge.net ...nothing more that a point of discussion
> between two friends (1 statistician(me) and 1 C++ developer). The time goes
> bye e nothing came up.. so i'm here to enjoy with you. I spammed already a
> lot of people that could be interested and could contribute to this
> project.. me too.

The project could indeed need a good statistician. Right now, however, the 
syntax/semantics for the plugins is still very unfinished, and likely to 
change, so it does not make much sense to put a lot of effort into writing 
plugin yet.

> Obversive is another cool project, but joint forces is better for a common
> result.. i think ;)

As a matter of fact, I've been exchanging a few mails with the 
obveRsive-project, and we might join forces soon.

> I appreciate the way of kparts/koffice integration and SPSS GUI-like-model.
> Actually i think that with the release of Kde3.1 we could think/use SVG
> graph report.. all XML derivative, easy to export easy to play.

Should this project be joined with obveRsive however, that would mean to go 
for something truely portable, i.e. not use KDE/kparts. Office integration 
might be a good deal harder to accomplish then, but surely still possible in 
some way.
I'd be happy to get some feedback on what everybody else thinks. Should we 
rather go for a cross-platform solution with probably more developers, or 
should we try to create a solution that fits smoothly into KDE (with probably 
fewer developers)? Would anybody willing to contribute do so only under one 
of these conditions?
By the way, as far as the SPSS-like GUI is concerned, my current thoughts are, 
to have the app start up looking much like SPSS, so people migrating from 
there will feel at home. The GUI should however allow a lot more flexibility 
than SPSS, and esp. be able to deal with multiple sets of data (objects).

> Soon i'll make a report for usability issues.
> When RKward will be i18n compatible? I'm ready to start Italian
> localization.

Not quite yet. This first release was just a rough draft. The next step is to 
determine, which direction the project should be heading. This may mean 
changing substantial portions of the code, or even program everything again 
from the ground up (it was not actually that much work, anyway) using a 
different toolkit. Therefore, I think it's still a bit early for localization 
efforts. Thanks for your offer, however, and stay tuned.

Thomas