SoC 2007

So that's that. After having used the past two months for improving filefield and imagefield, it's about time that I get started with my RCS abstraction project. aclight has been as kind as to publish his work and findings in time with the Summer of Code, so that's a good starting point already. His work on the xcvs scripts (...bootstrapping Drupal, yay) benefits my project a lot, and the issues with password storage are good to know of.

In order to come up with a set of good questions that I'll need to research, I had a first shot on the database schema and the overall idea of how this thing should work. I thought it would be a good idea to see what we want to achieve and what we can rely on, before figuring out how to abstract all the stuff that's supposed to be different among the various revision control systems. Bullet points galore.

Just had time now to flesh out one of Dries's wish lists. It's located here: http://drupal.org/node/133560. Comments and suggestions will be appreciated.

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I (also it seems) submitted a proposal on the SVG drawing idea. I'm also posting a copy here to get any comments.

Please excuse any misnomers I might have. I'm calling it a Drawing Module, however I think API might be a more appropriate term. I currently only have a basic grasp on the structure of Drupal.

I've started a section on my personal site to put up more information located here.

Abstract

Currently, Drupal has no SVG (scalable vector graphics) generation capabilities
and limits a Drupal plug-in developer to either using external libraries (e.g.
PEAR's XML_SVG), manually generating SVG, or bypassing SVG entirely and using GD
(or any other similar graphics libraries).

I will implement a drawing module and a SVG plugin for said module into Drupal
to give plug-in developers SVG capabilities and keep open the choice to add
different drawing API's into the drawing module.

I just uploaded my application to Google's Summer of Code web app, and I can say I'm quite proud of its current state. The application has seen a couple of iterations based on valuable feedback by Adam Light and Derek Wright, both of which are working on RCS stuff for the Project module. Being fed into Google, this means that the Drupal mentors can now place private comments and supporting votes there.

Given that there are a good number of comments on some of the other proposals in this group, I'm still wondering if there is something I can do to spread the word and get more input from the greater public. After all, work on the Project module severely affects the great majority of drupal.org users, and getting rid of CVS as a hard dependency should really be discussed in the wider community. So do communicate your opinions about my application, its benefits for Drupal, its chances to get elected, its shortcomings, challenges, etc. ...I'm listening.

I would like to share my proposal (already submitted) with the community, in the hope to receive some feedback regarding ideas on what SVG could be used in the future in later modules, and also regarding how you would like to have such an API implemented. Any feedback is very much appreciated. I started to collect ideas, and possible targets for this project here. I am also planning to do a small investigation into KML.

I cut out not relevant parts, such as Bio, Roadmap and Success Criteria.

Abstract

Hello, all,

I posted a proposal for integrating some of the functionality exposed through Google's APIs into Drupal:

http://drupal.org/node/128258

Cheers,

Bill

For this Summer of Code, I'll apply for reworking the Project module to free it of CVS specifics. The greater plan is, of course, to get SVN support into project.module (and pave the way for other RCS backends), but if I am to believe knowledgable developers like dww and chx, getting the revision control functionality abstracted out into an RCS API module is already a lot of work. In case it should work out faster than expected ("unlikely" :D ) I figure I can still do the SVN specific bits in the time that remains.

You can find my application here. It's essentially complete, but before submitting it to Google I'm still waiting for feedback from dww, and yours can be helpful as well! As a short teaser, here's the introductory part of my application as copied from my website:

Make case tracker more project management friendly.

Motivation

From now until March 24, Google is accepting student applications. More details here: http://drupal.org/node/127999

Short Project Description:
Creating User SMS registration and notification based on the existing SMS Gateway module, and give some basic SMS-enabled features.

Motivation:
The SMS Gateway module is a good base for SMS integration in Drupal, but it forces the Drupal site creator to write relevant code for any feature needed.

The main idea is to create a basic set of functions and features which will give the site creator set of ready-made features.
The list of features I think that should be implemented are:

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