Hello everyone,
In the hopes that I will be forgiven for joining the fray so late in the proceedings, I'm here to do my obligatory introduction as a GSoC candidate :) My name is Cristian Dinu and I'm a Romanian EECS student with about 2 years of experience in professional web development. Although I've been an avid user of FOSS for many years now, this is the first time I will be applying my skills to further the cause of open-source development. But one has to start somewhere, and I figure, what better way to begin than by making an improvement to the venerable database administration tool that we all know and love?
The idea I've come up for my proposal may seem rather crazy, but I'm confident that I can make it materialize in the short time that is available. Basically, what I want to do is to endow all SQL query editors in phpMyAdmin with IntelliSense-like functionality (obviously implemented using JavaScript). I can't count the number of times I've found myself writing a query, only to have to stop to check the exact name of some field in a table that isn't focused, or this or that obscure bit of SQL syntax. I feel my idea, once implemented, would greatly increase productivity and help many users feel somewhat less frustrated with pma's aging interface.
What do you guys think of this idea? Is it really as useful as I think it is? Would it be overkill or burden pma excessively? Before you ask, it goes without saying that the feature would degrade gracefully so that users with JS disabled or unsupported browsers would still be able to enter queries in a plain text field :)
Thanks, -- Cristian Dinu