From: "richard.j.dale@..." <richard.j.dale@...>
Date: 2007-03-19T11:35:06+09:00
Subject: KDE Ruby SOC projects

The KDE project has been approved for Google's Summer of Code project
with an unlimited number of possible projects subject to project
quality and suitable mentors. Alexander Dymo has proposed 'Implement
foundations for KDevelop4 Ruby language support' here:

http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Summer_of_Code/2007/Ideas#KDevelop_.26_Quanta

And that is the most important starting point for KDevelop 4 ruby
support.

I'm happy to mentor other projects to improve ruby support as part of
SOC, and here are my dreams. A dream is not the same as a concrete
proposal to Google, and so if you want to volunteer we will need to
come up with a proposal and deliverables that can actually be done in
the time available.

- 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