[Phpmyadmin-devel] GSoC 2010, my introduction and idea

[Cristian Dinu]

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