Firewatir-Gen

So it is official. My proposal for the Google Summer of Code program has been accepted by Ruby Central Inc. and will receive Google funding. The one for Eclipse wasn’t accepted, and it was the one I had dedicated myself less to, so I’m very happy with what I got.

Angrez Singh is my mentor and Aaron Patterson is my co-mentor. It is a great thing that I got such great mentors, because they are very knowledgeable on the field I’m about to embark in. Angrez is the main developer of Firewatir and Aaron is the man behind the Mechanize library.

The title of the proposal was “A Recorder/Code generator for FireWatir” and, for now, I have named the project Firewatir-Gen. I’ve created some empty bootstrap resources:

• Google Code Project Hosting: code.google.com/p/firewatir-gen
• Mailing list/Google Group: groups.google.com/group/firewatir-gen
• Blog tag: obvio171.wordpress.com/tag/firewatir-gen

I’ll be keeping a weekly (in the least) column here where I’ll report the latest developments and decisions taken from the meetings with my mentors (which will happen twice a week). So you can filter the activity for the project specifically (although it will most likely be the *only* activity) through the tag firewatir-gen.

The mailing list for now is open, so everyone is welcome to come in and give their two cents. If the flurry of contributions and discussions get out of hand we might think of making a firewatir-gen-core list and a firewatir-gen-talk one :P

Summer of Code All-nighters

After about a week of digging up stuff on Free Software projects, subscribing to a dozen mailing lists, emailing developers, reading documentation, waiting for feedback, thinking up proposals, twisting and changing them, confronting them wih my own limitations and interests, I finally gave birth to two applications for the Google Summer of Code, one for Ruby Central and the other for Eclipse. Below are the abstracts:

The Ruby Central application:

This project aims at allowing users to record normal usage on a website and then have a script generated that can reproduce such actions.

This script is generated in Ruby and can be changed and mixed with existing Ruby code to extend its behaviour, using regular Ruby variables, loop constructs, etc.

A parser is going to be built for Firefox logs of user-activity (extracted by existing free software extensions) with the ability to generate code for the browser-driving tool FireWatir.

The Eclipse application:

Ruby has a fast-growing community which has not yet settled for one particular
editor/IDE and still has ongoing debates on that topic. It has not found a home
yet.

The ability to change one’s surroundings and make it more confortable for daily
usage by implementing helpers appropriate to one’s specific needs is crucial in
having this feeling of acquaintance and familiarity with a tool.

Unfortunately, the barrier of entry into Eclipse plug-in development for Ruby
users is still pretty high, as few are as skilled in Java as they are in Ruby.

This project aims to bridge that gap by allowing Eclipse plug-ins (or a subset
of the possible ones) to be develop entirely in Ruby.

This last one was written on a rush and with almost no previous research so it’s not very well-finished. I’m open to any ideas and suggestions on either one.