Yes, Dojo is participating in the Google Summer of Code in 2008! This is our third year involved, and we have six projects on the go - read more about each of them below. We had 21 quality applications this year, a nice improvement on 2007.
Rob Coup is organising the Summer of Code for Dojo in 2008. You can get hold of him with any questions or problems to do with SoC.
rcouprobert.couprobert@coup.net.nzThe idea of our coding test is to assess where your strengths and weaknesses are so we can evaluate your Summer of Code proposals better and get an idea of which mentors might suit you best. Not everyone is expected to be strong in every area, but make sure you show off what you're good at and what you're passionate about!
We want you to build a single page that lets users discover trends and build understanding about the provided data. In this case, it's a set of student marks for a course called "DOJO.101". There are some details for each student (name, age, sex, campus), marks for 4 assignments, and a total weighted mark for the course.
Things we'll be looking for:
There are lots of aspects you could focus on:
You don't need to bother doing any of the following:
We want you to spend no more than 8 hours working on it, so you'll need to choose which aspects you want to focus on to showcase your skills. This is important - don't spend days and days on it, life is too short! It is much better to focus on a few things in depth than try and do everything in a mediocre way. Having said that, if you're proposing a Summer of Code project on accessibility then spending some time on a11y would be sensible - likewise for i18n, charts, build system, ...
Once you're done please find a suitable web-host and place your code there, and when you're filling in your SoC application to Google, make sure you include:
The data is available in the following formats so hopefully you shouldn't have to do any manipulation at all:
Any questions? Add a comment here or start a topic in the SoC forums. We're not going to be providing "is this good enough?" answers - you're expected to work independently and decide when you're done.
This page will serve as a list of questions and answers about Dojo's Summer of Code in 2008. We'll flesh this out a bit more over the next couple of weeks. Add any questions or comments to this page and we'll roll them in, or get in touch with Rob.
Google's FAQ on the summer of code is the definitive answers around how the programme will work overall, we'll focus on the Dojo-specific bits here.
Add a comment here or head to the forum.
Important: See the Dojo Summer of Code homepage for lots of other useful information, including FAQs, what should be in your application, the coding test, and where to get help.
dojox.charting is already pretty impressive, lets make it the #1 Javascript charting engine!
Be able to assess input text based on how well it can be read by normal people - particularly useful for content management systems. There are a number of different ways of measuring readability of text.
There are a number of widely used markup languages available today, and it would be great to provide client-side previews. Then people can easily check they've got it right without round-tripping to the server.
Dojo already has a widely used and very powerful build and packaging system.
console.debug())requireIf() and other clever stuff work.Power-up the DOH framework! Cross-OS and cross-browser, so we can provide better QA without requiring an army of people. And making it work better for widget testing! These are some pretty hard and challenging tasks.
There is now support (to be released in FF3+1) that supports 3D GPU code in the browser. Basically, write some code in a tag directly in the HTML page, and your code is passed straight into the GPU for executing. Opera and Webkit are following closely behind. How could we integrate this into Dojo GFX? What client-side tools or support can build into Dojo to make 3D development easy in the browser. You'll need to be very comfortable with OpenGL and 3D development.
Development tools and debugging tools for Javascript aren't the best, which makes it hard for Dojo users. These will be quite complex projects.
Rails has helpers to make AJAX easier for Prototype built-in. How can we make similar tags/helpers for Dojo users? Can we do it for other platforms like Django or Smarty? You'll need to have worked with server-side frameworks and understand what the developers and designers there are looking for.
Update: For Rails, this is underway already at d-rails (IRC #d-rails on Freenode)... there is an alpha due out in a week or so, and Bob is looking for more help. This is an early stage project that will grow and change quickly, so you'll need to be on your toes. As a starting point, you could think about how to enable dijit widgets in a nice rails-friendly way.
Flare is an open source toolkit written in ActionScript3 for doing advanced visualizations. It'd be great to expose this functionality to Dojo applications in a consistent way and clean way.
Internationalization, or i18n, is the process of making an application flexible to work in different languages and respect different conventions and customs. Dojo has one of the only Javascript i18n frameworks in dojo.i18n, but it could be a lot better.
There are lots of lists of small, popular bits of code written for jQuery. It would be nice to see:
Dojo has a mature accessibility framework and we want all the core Dijit widgets ally-enabled, and as many from dojox as possible.
Have a look through the dojox components - most have big possibilities for expansion or improvement. Each dojox component has a README file, and many have a todo list written up in there which could serve as a starting point to a SoC project.
Otherwise, feel free to add a comment with your own ideas!