Google Summer of Code 2012 Ideas

Rules

• Be creative
• Be specific: what do you want to be implemented
• If you are willing to mentor those ideas, add your name and email to the idea.
• GSoC project ideas should align with an existing Eclipse project
• If you're an interested student, add your name and email next to the idea. It is ok to have several students interested in one idea.
• Aspiring students and mentors need to register and submit their proposals on the SoC app

Mentors info

If you were a mentor last year then you are automatically in the list this year (the GSoC site may require that you re-register, but we think of you as "in").

Note that we only accept as mentors people who are known to us. This includes Eclipse committers. If you would like to be a mentor, please either introduce yourself to the group using the soc-dev mailing list, or send a note to EMO.

Ideas submission

Idea proposal should contain the following information:

• project title, like "WTP - Improve auto-complete in xml editor"
• description with links to bug reports, project wiki pages, etc
• Reporter: who submitted idea (optional e-mail)
• Possible Mentors: who would like to mentor the students
• More info: other links or e-mail
• Eclipse Project: link to main eclipse project that improvement is targeting
• Potential students: who is interested (with optional e-mail). This one completely informal, to actually be interested you need to submit the proposal. Contact the idea owner or possible mentor to get some details before submitting it.

Ideas

These are some ideas. Students feel free to base your GSoC proposals on these ideas (note that you are more likely to find a mentor for an idea that has been proposed by a mentor). Some of these ideas can be factored into multiple projects; a GSoC project proposal can work on parts of these ideas (i.e. you don't necessarily have to do it all).

There are other sources of ideas. There are numerous bugs in the Eclipse Bugzilla issue tracking system marked as "helpwanted" that may give you ideas.

Xtext, EMF, and MongoDB

Ed Merks and I have created a project called MongoEMF that allows you to persist EMF objects to MongoDB. MongoEMF has the ability to query objects based on attribute and reference values, but is lacking some functionality and robustness. We think a re-write of the query engine using Xtext and EMF would make for a great Google Summer of Code project. This project has a very well defined scope, is easily unit tested, and involves some pretty cool technology.

The project will consist of two major parts. The first will be to define a query grammar (possibly re-using an existing grammar) using Xtext. The result will be an EMF query model that can be serialized and de-serialized to a string. The string will be used as the query portion of a URI, and must be human readable. For example: mongo://host/db/collection/?(tag == 'java' || tag == 'JSON') && (category == 'Eclipse'). Clients will be able to specify the query as string or EMF model. The second part of the project will be to create a processing engine that builds a MongoDB query from the EMF query model. The result will be a DBObject that can be sent to MongoDB as a query.

An example use-case is as follows: A client constructs an EMF query model. The query model is then serialized to a string and included in a URI. The URI is sent to a server in a HTTP GET call. The server extracts the query string from the URI and re-builds the EMF query model. The query model is passed to the query engine and a DBObject is returned containing a MongoDB specific query. The DBObject is sent to MongoDB resulting in some number of DBObjects returned. The resulting DBObjects are converted into EMF objects and returned to the client.

The student is expected to develop extensive unit tests for his / her code as well as end-user documentation. Documentation will be contributed to the UserGuide on the MongoEMF wiki. We also anticipate that the student will become a committer on MongoEMF, and will continue to provide bug fixes and enhancements after the project is complete.

We consider this to be an advanced Eclipse project. The student should already be comfortable coding in Java and developing OSGi bundles with Eclipse. A student with working knowledge of EMF will be preferred, but you are not required to already know Xtext or MongoDB. If you are interested in this project, I would recommend forking the MongoEMF project on GitHub and experimenting with the latest code in the master branch. Instructions for setting up your environment can be found on the Development wiki page.