Summer Of Code 2009

Summer Of Code 2009

The Summer Of Code is a Google program that offers student developers stipends to create new freely available programs or to help currently established projects. It would be an excellent opportunity for GNUstep to fund some developments.

Joint Application?

The idea of a joint application for GNUstep, Étoilé, GAP and opengroupware.org has been brought up. A lot of the projects that were accepted last year were joint applications (e.g. GNU, GNOME, KDE), so it might improve our chances. Please discuss!

Ideas

Here are some ideas -- Feel free to add more

• Porting
  • Porting WebKit (using GCC 4.x with ObjC++ support) should be a lot easier by now (see http://lwat.blogspot.com/2008/11/redistributable-webkit.html and http://lwat.blogspot.com/2009/02/opencflite-476171-release.html)
  • helping to improve Simple WebKit which does not require gcc 4.xx and Obj-C++ and has less dependencies and a much smaller footprint than full WebKit

• General Improvements
  • Windows support
  • GNUstepWeb (add script language support, etc)
  • Compare current API with Leopard's (Mac OS X 10.5) API, indicate which classes are missing, and summarize the current status of the existing ones, then work to complete them... ;) The best would be to have a tool which parses all headers (both from Cocoa and GNUstep) and outputs differences in HTML (XML probably too by the way). This would summarize missing classes, missing or partially implementated methods in existing classes and GNUstep-specific extensions. Eventually we should include links to the related documentation on both GNUstep and Cocoa web sites.
  • Craft a system which allows to distribute GNUstep to the various packaging systems (rpm, debian, ports, etc.) on various distributions (Ubuntu, Red Hat, FreeBSD, etc.) with a snap and without knowledge of the specific packaging system. This system should be able to distribute GNUstep libraries, and existing or new applications written with it. The user should be able to choose how often this is done: on request, on each release, on in regular intervals, tracking a source code repository. Ideally, changes to the library/app's sources are minimized and/or calculated at runtime.

• AppKit
  • Themes for GNUstep. This includes coming up with a general concept for the handling of AppKit subclasses in themes, the moving of all drawing code from the GUI classes into theme methods, replacing all hard coded panels with Gorm/NIB files and as the prove of the concept a native Windows theme (Or at least one theme that looks sufficiently different from standard GNUstep).

• Base

• Misc
  • Create a AJAX Framework for GNUstepWeb (similar to what Project Wonder provides for WebObjects

• More Ideas
  • Summer Of Code Ideas

Note

We need mentor(s) to manage the volunteers...

Mentors

- t.b.a.

Students

- t.b.a.