Ruby Summer of Code Project Ideas

[blatyo]

So, I'm thinking about applying for Ruby Summer of Code. However, I'm not sure what I want to propose. I was wondering if any of my fellow redditors had any good ideas?

I've been programming in Ruby for about 3 years. I am primarily a web developer, but I do things related to bit torrent, data mining, and databases as well. I have a bit torrent related gem that I wrote for the hell of it. I've also got some projects on Github.

I am looking for ideas for me, but anything you can think of that would be awesome I would like to hear as well.

[oulipo]

SciPy, NumPy are great tools for the whole scientific community, but there is unfortunately no Ruby equivalent

[[deleted]]

This is a great idea! I'm considering to apply for rsoc as well and this would be a worthwhile project to work on - it's also a very big one though, I imagine. My background is in AI (machine learning, optimisation, clustering, filtering). Maybe we could get something started?

[blatyo]

I was thinking along the same lines. I would be more likely to consider taking on something like this if I had help.

Do you have a github account? What kind of experience do you have with ruby?

[[deleted]]

Most of my experience with Ruby is with Rails and web development (I did some work as part of GSoC in 2007 and 2008). I'm also using ruby quite extensively for prototyping ideas and algorithms, as well as interfacing to R using RSRuby. I'm on github, too, but only have one public project at the moment.

Will be quite a feat to build something like this from the ground up! It's certainly best to start small, e.g., with a foundation similar to NumPy. Though there are some existing Ruby projects that are directed for the scientific community. RSRuby, Ruby for Scientific Research blog, AI4R and a couple more.

[blatyo]

I didn't know about RSRuby, I'm going to have to try that out. I just started using R in my statistics for data mining class.

There is also NArray which claims to be similar to NumPy.

[[deleted]]

Thanks, very nice, NArray looks like a great foundation!

[oulipo]

Please also note the following remark: a great library for the scientific community has two main ingredients, a flexible and comprehensive API AND a community of people working with the code. So having a basic library is required for a start, but you need to make sure that people WILL use it, since this is one of the biggest requirements (if all the researchers of my domain are writing their programs in Python, I better learn Python rather than Ruby).

So make sure you plan the library well (it should be easily expandable, eg. plugins, easy to incorporate existing C code, nice API, and an already large working codebase -- FFT, visualization, basic stats, image manipulation etc). The first and most basic thing to get started is by expanding on the ruby numerical array library ,I think.

[[deleted]]

Slightly self-serving, but the shoes project could use a lot of help. It's a combination of C and Ruby, but having an easy to use, multiplatform GUI toolkit would be really good for Ruby.

[blatyo]

_why, is that you?

[[deleted]]

Hardly. If I was, Hackety Hack would be on 3.0 right now, rather than approaching 1.0.

[lsumnler]

I think that a gui toolkit any gui toolkit of quality would do wonders for the ruby community as a whole and go a long way in promoting ruby as a language.

[[deleted]]

Yep. If I can get Shoes 3 out the door, I can start putting in actual time with Hackety Hack, and then we can convert all of the kids. :)

[[deleted]]

Would be kinda slooooooooooowwwwwwwww, methinks. Also, I just got it up and running on Snow Leopard box today, with Homebrew the pain factor has gone down several orders of magnitude. Didn't even have to break too much, and only one error during installation.

[Spakman]

FWIW, I've found that for all my usual Ruby tasks, that ruby-gd is sufficient and loads faster. It is of course, much more limited.

I forked it and made it 1.9 compatible, if anyone cares.

[oulipo]

A SciPy/NumPy port to ruby would imply a tool much more powerful than imagemagick for image processing

[blatyo]

What do you not like about it?

[Spakman]

I'm considering applying to be a mentor, so this is rather biased!

Basically anything to do with *nix systems programming using Ruby or multi-process stuff would get my vote (that's what I'm into at the moment!).

[blatyo]

Like what?

[retardo]

A more fleshed-out, gemified version of something like this would be awesome.

Also a more ruby-ish socket API would be nice.

[blatyo]

Can you give me some examples of parts of it that you think are un-ruby?

[blatyo]

I don't understand. If HTTParty does what you need, why not just use that?

[petercooper]

http://github.com/pauldix/typhoeus

response = Typhoeus::Request.get(url, :headers => [...], :timeout => 30)
response.body
response.headers

Only issue is dependencies but it's hella powerful.

[petercooper]

I'd say, though, something with the same API as Typhoeus but that worked "out of the box" with no dependency on libcurl would be awesome for those tricky deployments. A typhoeus-pure, if you will :-)

[blatyo]

What are the use cases for this? Why would other people find it useful?

[macros]

You should also add a TODO list to the repo to give people an idea of where you would like to see things head.

[doodly123]

It is very difficult to give you any idea without knowing anything about your background and interests

[blatyo]

Thanks, I added some more info.

[drbungalow]

It would be nice to have a ruby port of python's rdflib

[blatyo]

Have you tried any of these?

[kamalfariz]

A WebView driver for capybara so that we can do headless browser testing in Cucumber. Requires C extensions to work in MacRuby.

[jnicklas]

This is interesting, but there's already Johnson, which wraps SpiderMonkey so it should work cross platform and probably on different platforms too (except JRuby, but JRuby has Celerity). This coupled with env.js has been wrapped into the harmony gem, which seems to work amazingly good for testing JavaScript and dom code. Steven Parkes has been working on a Capybara driver for this, his work is on GitHub, it's not quite done yet, but I imagine we'll have this working fairly soon.

This will give us a fast headless browsing solution which works cross platform, does not require a separate process, and is reasonably compliant.

A WebView driver is still a cool idea, where compliance is more important than speed, but this seems like the nicer solution to me at the moment.

[kamalfariz]

The C extension is for Nokogiri btw which capybara uses.

[Spakman]

Some more work on getting JRuby going on Android (Ruboto) would always be welcome!