My name is Fábio, I'm a student of Computer Science at Federal University of Paraíba, Brazil, and an enthusiastic of GSoC. As I've working with phpMyAdmin in the last two years, I'd love to contribute and to improve this excellent tool. I'm interested to implement some object oriented improvements on some existing module/functionality, like import or export a database, CRUD operations, etc.
I'm studying the phpMyAdmin code base (and documentation), looking for some bit of code which needs to be refactored or could be encapsulated into a class. Maintaining a OOP code is easier and we can make it much more re-usable and self-independent, mainly when the code is re-utilized, like various phpMyAdmin functions, so any improvements are welcome, of course, with a good test covering and an excellent analysis of the consequences into the code.
Although I've never had posted/committed any bug solution, I'd like to be closer to the project and this opportunity came right on time, since I worked the last two year entirely with php/mysql (I finished a social network for tourists which is about to be launched soon) and it gave me an excellent experience (since I worked with a lot of design patterns, discovering and correcting pitfalls and traps in PHP language, and good part of the development driven by tests). So, I hope I can mix my experience with an opportunity to increase a tool which I constantly use, beside the chance to be in touch with the leaders and the team of this development. I know is necessary a 40 hours per week, along the 12 weeks, so I'm wondering, maybe I can use the free time between the deadline to rank the students and the real coding beginning, in order to gain some time to give the project some tests (it's obvious we'll need some unit tests to keep the system saved), even start the coding (since I'll still having some classes during the first month, unfortunately), and discuss the idea so we can enhance the improvement :)
Is there anything else I can do beside exploring the code? How can I discuss the focus of the implementation? I just can't wait to work with it and finally make my real contribution. Thank you all in advance.
Best Regards, Fábio Cruz B. de Albuquerque