[Phpmyadmin-devel] GSoC Ideas

[Dieter Adriaenssens]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your interest in phpMyAdmin GSoC.

2011/3/31 Michael Bundy <michaeltbundy at gmail.com>:
> Hello,
>
> I'm a second year CS and EE at Bristol University, England.
>
> I have exams until the 17th of June. I know officially students are meant to
> start on the 23rd of May, and I would be willing to make a start then, but
> since I have exams around that period, I wouldn't be able to work on it full
> time until the 17th. Would this be a problem?

So that's about 3 weeks. It depends on how much you can do before,
after and during your examens. Catching up 3 weeks of full-time (40
hours/week) development work, might be hard, but I guess you can best
decide if you will be able to do it.

> Okay, I'm thinking of putting forward 2 proposals, both from the idea's
> page. But before I do, I need to clarify a few things.
>
> Zoom Search (and more AJAX)
> I'm not sure if anyone has ever looked into it, but jqPlot looks like it'd
> be ideal for this. It already has a zoom feature, offers a bit of
> "shininess", and would be quite straight forward to implement, I feel. Since
> pma is already implementing jQuery, using a plugin of it makes sense.
> jqPlot also offers a simple line of best fit. Would a few more simple
> mathematical functions (K-means, standard deviation, Cov?) be worth it?
> While I don't expect anyone to want to do anything serious in a browser, it
> might be worth it to have a simple way of viewing trends without having to
> export the database to something like matlab.
> Even with the extra mathematical functions, I feel like it probably wouldn't
> take much time to implement - i.e less than 4 weeks - and adding more AJAX
> seems to be the idea that naturally fits.
>
> If this seems like a good idea I'll look more into the AJAXify part. (and
> probably try 1 or 2 for a contribution)
> Failing that, dealing with the "Browse-mode improvements", I feel that
> working full time on that, I could probably get through most of that list in
> about 4 weeks, especially since jQuery can be used.
> The main question here is would phpmyadmin save thing's like the last view
> table or SQL command in a flat file, use the database or have a choice?
>
> The jqPlot website has a lot of examples on it (
> http://www.jqplot.com/tests/ )
> I'm currently working on the concept, though its still a WIP and right now
> only displays random data. Still, I think it should shows that doing what is
> required should be quite straightforward. http://mirey.pcriot.com/zoom.php
>
> phpMyAdmin OOP
> This seems like a massive job, as it'd be rewritting the whole of PMA. Would
> there be any opposition to using a framework such as codeigniter?
> I guess the main question is, would it use none of the old code until it is
> finished, or would it there be a period where it would be OOP and the old
> procedural stuff?

Turning phpMyAdmin into OOP is huge, so that's why it's not in the
scope of one GSoC project to rewrite everything. The idea is to
rewrite small parts of the existing code, and gradually evolving to a
more OOP phpMyAdmin.

No frameworks, we will just stick to OOP and design patterns.

> An argument against CI is that people would have to learn how to use CI. But
> I'd argue that having an arbitrary way of doing it would be more time
> consuming to learn, and people are likely to know how to use CI, or
> something similar anyway.
> Would it be worth splitting this down into a number of student projects,
> each focusing on a particular part?

Basically there is one OOP project during this GSoC, so we will choose
the best proposal.

> I'd ultimately like to do this, though before I think about it further, I'd
> want to know whether I could use a framework,  or if it would need to be
> from scratch.
>
> Thank you,
> Mike
>

Good luck with GSoC and with submitting your proposal.
Please keep in mind that you will need to submit a patch solving a bug
or a feature request, as is mentioned in the 2nd point of the GSoC
Applicant Guide :
http://wiki.phpmyadmin.net/pma/GSoC_2011_Applicant_Guide

Kind regards,

Dieter