Summer Coding 2010 proposal - beacon wiki integration

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About you

1. My name is Subodh Rohilla
2. Email : subodh.rohilla@gmail.com
3. Wiki Use name : Subodh
4. IRC Nick : sr_rules
5. Primary Languages : English , Hindi
6. Location : Delhi ( India) , Time of work : 11:00 am to 9 pm ( GMT + 5:30 )
7. I have good coding skills and I take regular part in coding events of Local ACM chapter events and spoj.pl . I have lot of experience in PHP and AJAX. My major projects include IBM TGMC 2009 and web designing internship at "A PLUS Solutions Pvt.Ltd."[1] . As far as my contribution to open source is concerned :-
   • I help users in IRC and mailing list by troubleshooting their Problems .
   • I maintain my Institute's LUG Mailing List ( http://groups.google.co.in/group/bit-lug?hl=en ).
   • I use beta releases and report issues to make suggestions to make the software better.

About your project

1. The name of my project is Beacon. It started off as GSoc Project for Gentoo under the name Web Based XML Editor.After that it again got selected in GSoc for Gentoo in 2008 and for Fedora in 2009. And due to its increasing importance, it's here in Fedora Soc 2010
2. The idea is taken from this proposal and most of the clarification is done by interaction with the mentors through #beacon IRC and Email.
3. The main aim of this project is to create an online WYSIWYG DocBook editor which will greatly help fedora community in maintaining the documentation. There are various offline Open Source DocBook tools available e.g. serna. But as online tool will be more useful because there are far fewer requirements on the client side. Some previous work has also been done on an online xml editor Beacon in previous Summers. Now, this summer the idea is to create a wiki editor in which we can include the Beacon as a library to enable editing of the docbook online that too in WYSIWYG way. The approach for creating the editor is to starting with wikimedia software( customized to the look and feel of fedora website) and modifying it to make it extensible with the help of external libraries so that we can add Docbook editing in it. As far as technology useage is concerned the frontend will require knowledge of JavaScript,DOM ,AJAX and html while the backend will be in php and XML. As docbook editing is required , knowledge about XSL is also required to complete this project.
4. Basic Approach to be Used :-
   • The aim will be towards editing interface of the various modules of the MeadiaWiki , so that it support loading various parts from library and any library can be called as per the request of the user. This will necessitate editing those parts of software which are tightly integrated so that more flexibility can be introduced by loading modules and libraries . I have studied Wordpress source code and I have an idea of how modularity can be introduced in Wikimedia CMS. Because both of these CMS share the same community , much of their code is same and the wordpress approach of modularity can be used.
   • Second part of the project will include loading the Beacon library in to WikiMedia , so that it can be used as an alternative editor in wikimedia,
   • Benefits :-
     • As there is no change is being made to the wiki parser module which is fully developed , they is a very narrow scope for bugs to creep in to that code.
     • As no major changes are being made to the base code of wikimedia , the library can be tested easily because it will loaded as an alternative module to the editor and the bug in library will not crash the wiki software.
5. Timeline :
   • 1 June - 6 June :- Understanding the Meadiawiki software and working out the exact changes in the software needed.
   • 7 June - 28 June :- Finishing the work on Mediawiki Software
   • 28 June - 5 July :- Starting contingency plan in case projects fails to meet the targeted requirements to ensure that midterm target is 90% by 5 June. Otherwise starting work on library integration step.
   • 6 July - 20 July :- Work on integrating the library is to be completed.
   • 20 July - 27 July :- If the project is not completed by 20th , then using it as a reserve to commit the final changes. Otherwise testing Starts.
   • 28 July - 3 August :- Time to finish the alpha testing and the committing changes if any.
   • 4 August - 8August :- Finishing the Documentation , Final Reports , Code snapshots and other procedures required for making final submission
6. Convincing :
   • I have good coding skills.I am a regular participant of the ACM local Chapter in our campus.I have good programming experience with UVa Online Judge, SPOJ and Project Euler.
   • Because of my troubleshooting nature, I will not stuck in middle of the project at any cost.
   • Familiar with rpm packaging and open-source IDEs( I like Eclipse) .
   • I coded in JSP and "AJAX" for a contest organized by IBM that was about Developing an application "Online Medical Home".That project asked to do that using IBM tools like DB2, Websphere.
   • Previous summer I have done full-time internship in web development with "A Plus Solutions Pvt. Ltd". The technologies involved were PHP,Ajax and CSS. I have made significant contribution to their website.
   • I have also experience of various CMS which include WordPress ,Joomla and Moodle. I am also on the verge of completing a project on Moodle CMS which is hosted here.

You and the community

1. The Fedora community will be benefited from this project in following ways :-
   • It will provide an open source alternative for proprietary web-bases XML/DocBook Editors. There are some good opens source desktop applications available for desktop use but web-based Editors are desired because they need far fewer requirements on the client end.So, this software will help in managing XML/Docbook data online
   • If the project is complete ,it will help the fedora community in maintaining the documentation. Because fedora documentation uses DocBook format and this project will enable them doing so in GUI and thus making them more productive at their work. ( Satya Komargiri)
   • Development of Beacon library will help in integrating this powerful editor with other solutions i.e. other projects will also be benefited from this project. ( Nandeep Mali )
2. If the project is stuck and mentors are not around then I will act depending upon present scenario. If the decision which I am going to make is very important regarding the fuure of project. I will mail mentors for suggestions. In the problem is due to some technical details such as I am umcomfortable with some part of developmentor technology .I will take help from relaed IRC channel and Fedora community.
3. Apart from blogging,I will schedule IRC chats with mentors so that I can explain them exactly what problems I am facing and what progress has been made.Also , they will be in better situation to know what actual progress has been made. In case, they are not avaialable on IRC, I will email them my queries and updates.

Miscellaneous

1. I am comfortable with technologies to be used and i have worked on similar projects projects.We want to make sure that you are prepared before the project starts
   • I have past experience in setting up LAMP enviournment.( I have conducted workshops on it in local LUG)
   • For developing , I have configured ZEND-Eclipse IDE and also have included the AJAX support in it.
2. I communicated with my mentors though mail and #beacon IRC . Also , I had a very discussion with members of associated community(Special Thanks to quantumsummers(nick) ) in #beacon IRC. They helped me a lot in getting a better understanding of the requirements of this project.
3. T-shirt size is large.

Comments

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