From: Jeff Rose <rosejn@...>
Date: 2006-04-18T22:15:22+09:00
Subject: Re: Google Summer of Code -- It's back

Patrick Hurley wrote:
> On 4/17/06, Tanner Burson <tanner.burson@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 4/17/06, Jake McArthur <jake.mcarthur@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I'm also eligible, and this is right up my ally. Would love to get
>>> involved. I'm very intently keeping up with this thread for neat
>>> ideas, so any others would be appreciated.

I'm in as well.  I'll be applying as a student and I'm willing to do 
pretty much anything, but here are some ideas I had (in order of my 
enthusiasm :-):

1) An asynchronous networking framework for ruby.  Something ala ACE or 
Twisted, but in ruby with dynamic programming & closures it can be made 
so much more beautiful!  I think with an easy to use framework we could 
see an explosion of nifty p2p & other networking utilities and apps come 
out of the ruby community.  This type of project would help beef up 
non-blocking IO support in ruby, and provide a starting point for 
creating networked apps.  It could follow the lead of rails in using 
standard application layouts, generators etc. so people could quickly 
jump and in turn out new clients, servers, protocols, whatever.  Lots of 
existing libraries can be used directly or poached for code, but making 
an integrated system would help a lot.  Maybe a good idea to choose a 
specific application to guide the development?

2) Working on a more integrated documentation system would probably be 
very useful.  It could provide an interface to the documentation so code 
completing editors (vim7, yes!) could query for information about 
classes, methods etc, and it could allow for easier queries (e.g. 
regexps, tab completion...) in an interactive documention browser. 
Maybe something akin to the built-in help for python...  Another thing I 
was thinking could be cool is programmable comments for dynamic code.  I 
think Rdoc has a little support for declaring generators like 
attr_accessor, but that could be extended so people could program their 
documentation.  When using generated methods or method_missing it would 
be great if you could have a documentation_missing method as well...

I don't think it would be my choice, but I was thinking of a variation 
on the CMS described before.  A digital secretary organizer thingy, with 
a focus on making life easier to deal with rather than the same old web 
based lists and calendars.  So you have a data-store that holds say 
calendar events and contacts for starters.  Sure, throw a rails 
interface on top of the DB, but I want to be able to call it and leave 
it messages from my cell-phone, IM & email with it, and access it with 
an API so programs can use it as a central store.  It should be 
pluggable so people can add new interfaces, event handlers (desktop 
reminders, IM, email, phone, sms, glowing orbs, mp3, aibo dog) 
whatever...  As long as its clean and easily extended people will go 
nuts.  Lots of grunt work with a project like this though.  Implementing 
and/or debugging a ton of RFC based libraries for various formats of 
import, export, communication etc...

But yeah, how about that number 1?

-Jeff