GSOC - 2015

Akarshit

Hello everyone , My name is Akarshit , i am a currently pursuing my B.Tech from National Institute of Technology , Hamirpur (India) in Computer Science and Engineering.
I have been contributing to Processing for some time now and am familiar with the code base . For GSOC - 2015 i was thinking about working on the following ideas -
1. Shader editor PDE tool.
2. RiTa library extension.
Could someone please give some details about what is expected to be implemented in them and if they fit the scope of GSOC.

shiffman

Please take a look at the tool wiki to learn about how you can augment the Processing development environment. This OpenGL thread about text editors for shaders might also get you thinking.

I'm not clear on what a RiTa library extension would be. It is certainly a widely used Processing library so working on it would be an acceptable GSOC proposal. RiTa is maintained by Daniel Howe and if you are interested in contributing to it, I would start by looking over the github repo.

Akarshit

These ideas were directly taken from the Processing Fellow Ideas page
https://github.com/processing/processing/wiki/Processing-Fellow-Ideas
are these not the proposed ideas for GSOC ??

shiffman

Thanks, I forgot about this wiki. Indeed this is a list of ideas for things related to Processing, but the main GSOC project ideas wiki is here, please use this as the main reference.

https://github.com/processing/processing/wiki/Project-List

Akarshit

I thought that you have forgot about the page. It would be very helpful if worthy ideas from this page could be incorporated in the Project List page.

Akarshit

I was looking through the list of potential tools and found these ideas interesting.

1.Example viewer
2.Class creation "wizard"
3.Code performance evaluator, profiler
4.Code navigation tool (Builds a navigable diagram of classes and functions)

Do you think they fit the scope of GSOC ? If yes can you please tell me what to do next.

shiffman

I think any of these would fit the scope of GSOC. I would suggest building the current release from source and playing around with the PDE for as much time as you can to determine what you think might be missing or a good addition for a tool.

Akarshit

I have been looking into Processing code for quite some time now. There is a lot of features missing when PDE is compared with some other editors like Eclipse or Sublime etc.
But i think it would be better to first improve the most desired features like auto-complete, debugger etc.
Other minor features (like display of line numbers , jumping to line numbers, a window showing all shortcuts available in PDE etc.) and bugs , i keep reporting and implementing/correcting on the issue page.
It would be very helpful if you could give me a tool list based on priority, and discuss how exactly should the tool look-like/work .
Do tell if you need my views on the ideas listed here or a list of features i find missing in PDE.

shiffman

@Manindra29 are there any particular PDE bugs or items you might suggest @Akarshit start looking into as part of his proposal?

I might suggest a Shader Editor Tool as a project with a good GSOC scope.

Akarshit

@shiffman Ok i will look into The Shader Editor Tool.

Manindra29

@Akarshit I do not have any major bugs in mind that need attention (except for the Debugger issue on which Martin has made progress recently). I do have a feature idea in mind: javadoc/reference view on mouse hover. It could be helpful for beginners to have the reference for a method/class available on mouse hover.

This is how it works in eclipse (available as a tooltip). It would require parsing the javadoc for classes, extracting the right javadoc and displaying it as a html formatted tooltip.

Akarshit

@Manindra29 thanks for looking into this. I think this would be a great feature and would help the beginners a lot.
Is there a place where i can contact you directly ( like for doubts or suggestion ).
@shiffman what do you think about this ?

Manindra29

Yeah, sure! You can mail me on mmoharana [at] ucsd [dot] edu.

shiffman

I like this idea quite a bit as a feature for Processing. It would be incredibly useful to me personally and I think helpful to all. I should say that at the moment we are looking to finalize 3.0 without additional features getting in the way. So I would suggest proposing this idea and/or the Shader editor as stand-alone "tools". This way they can be developed outside of the 3.0 release schedule.

Akarshit

Thanks for your input , i will put the final proposal here first after drafting it. What is the expected release date for processing 3.0 ?

shiffman

There's no date to give at the moment, work is ongoing. You can follow the progress on github, thanks!

Akarshit

@shiffman could you give me some idea about what is expected in the Shader Editor Tool, because in this thread you mentioned there is a lot of things expected which cant be made in such a small time.
We can implement the basics so that a user doesn't have to switch editors for typing glsl code. What other things you think can be implemented ?

codeanticode

Hello Akarshit, the shader editor PDE tool would make a great GSOC project. Given the timeframe of GSoC, a reasonable goal would be to implement a simple text editor for GLSL files that provides some level of code completion and syntax highlighting, plus a way to remind the users of the quirks

codeanticode

If you have more questions about the shader editor idea, please let me know! Otherwise, go ahead with the proposal submission so we can start discussing the details directly on the Google Melange site.

Akarshit

@codeanticode No i don't have any further doubts , i will submit the proposal today (within 3 hrs).

Akarshit

@codeanticode i have submitted the proposal . Hoping to receive the feed backs.

Akarshit

How many slots did Processing get ? ( just curious to know )