GSoC application submitted, 22 ideas collected

Dear Smalltalkers,

We just submitted the application to this year GSoC, now let we wait
with fingers crossed for Google until next Friday to decide. I think we
have quite some chance, specially because we collected and very well
described 22 project ideas:

        http://gsoc2012.esug.org/ideas

There is still a time for ideas, so if someone has still half finished
one, please finish and publish it. Also authors of ideas please check if
your idea is put correctly on above page.

Best regards
Janko and Carla

--
Carla F. Griggio, Janko Mivšek
Smalltalk GSoC Admin Team
http://gsoc2012.esug.org

Name: A binding to R
Level: Advanced
Possible mentor: ?
Possible second mentor: ?

Description

With the increased popularity of high-level statistical programming language and environments for data analysis like R, a way to interface this package is becoming a must have for Smalltalk, since it implements complex and unrivalled statistical techniques for data manipulation and presentation, like Analysis of Variance, Covariance, Time Series, Generalized Linear Models, Additive Models, Non-linear Regressions, Tree Models, Multivariate Statistics, etc. besides the many mathematical functions, which are used in fields from economics to medicine and engineering. It is estimated that R posseses about 2 million of users worldwide and more than 2000 add-ons and increasing everyday through repositories like CRAN and Crantastic.org

Technical Details

The student should know or be motivated to learn statistics with the R environment and language, and its fundamental workflow: importing and preparing the data, and finally running the analysis, and presenting the results. Dealing with R sessions and presentation of results (like vectors and plots) will be challenging too.

Benefits to the Student

The student will gain invaluable experience from two complementary environments, and his experience with the interface technology choosed will be useful for the many projects where Smalltalk needs help from external systems.

Benefits to the Community

The goal of this project is to build a wrapper to interface R, an open source statistical programming language, providing a whole range of missing functionality to Smalltalk. This binding could complement the R environment where a general programming environment is needed, attracting many statisticians, and will open Smalltalk to domain-specific areas as diverse as Clinical Trials, Finance and Machine Learning.




--
Hernán Morales
Information Technology Manager,
Institute of Veterinary Genetics.
National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET).
La Plata (1900), Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Telephone: +54 (0221) 421-1799.
Internal: 422
Fax: 425-7980 or 421-1799.

Name: CSS Template System
Level: Easy / Intermediate
Possible mentor: Hernán Morales Durand
Possible second mentor: ?

Description

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a technology which allows personalized presentation styles of document contents. It is based in textual source code which has influence on the visual style and presentation of HTML and XML documents. This includes ways of assigning layout and style properties, such as font types and sizes, for different types of document components when they are presented. As having a long adoption rate from specification (CSS 1 : 1996, CSS 2 : 1998) to be fully supported by web browsers (2000 & 2006 for CSS2) it is predictable that CSS 3 modules like Backgrounds and Colors, Media Queries, and Multi-column Layout will come in no short time from now (2012), although many web sites today use CSS heavily. Through the years, the need for high-level presentation objects like grids and common layouts, leaded to the creation of CSS libraries called frameworks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSS_frameworks) to help web programmers in composing more attractive web sites in a rapid way.

Technical Details

The objective is to complete an initial CSS framework in Smalltalk (Phantasia http://www.squeaksource.com/Phantasia) with CSS Template objects. Phantasia avoids to learn CSS syntax, and with proper completion could obtain a rich object model of CSS objects beyond the specification limits, suitable to edition through Smalltalk code. High-level template objects could include navigational ones like lists, menus, or palettes, useful in wizards. Presentational objects like template layouts, which are already implemented by external CSS libraries like Blueprint, and scale to whole CSS templates including reports, galleries, etc.

The model should be independent of web framework so it could be re-used in Seaside, Aida, Iliad or other future web frameworks.

Benefits to the Student

The student will learn how to build and extend a model for a limited textual technology (CSS), from the low level objects like CSS functions to high level objects like Positioners. The student could apply the results of his work to several popular Smalltalk web frameworks.
 
Benefits to the Community

The Smalltalk community working with web technologies will be tremendously favoured by having ready-made CSS objects to incorporate easily in their web applications.