Community:SummerOfCode09:Brainstorming

This page is for submitting ideas for Summer of Code projects for 2009. Therefore, it will inevitably contain suggestions of wildly variable quality. Ideas approved by the SoC admins are here.

How To Make Good Suggestions

• Be specific. It's hard to understand the impact of, or the size of, vague proposals.
• Consider size. The student has eight weeks to design, code, test and document the proposal. It needs to fill, but not overfill, that time.
• Do your research. Support the idea with well-researched links.
• Don't morph other people's ideas. If you have a related idea, place it next to the existing one, or add a comment.
• Insert only your own name into the Mentor column, and then only if you are willing to take on the responsibility. Potential mentors sign up here.
• Check back regularly. The administrators may have questions about your idea that you will need to answer.

(More thoughts on making a good list)

Suggestion List

Last year's ideas: Confirmed, Brainstorming

Mozilla Platform

Title	Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc	Reporter	Mentor(s)	Comments
Web pages over rsync	A lot of web pages today are dynamic and so uncacheable, even though large parts of them are the same between requests. The rsync protocol is a great way of sending the deltas between two similar files in a small number of bytes. tridge has done a proof of concept, using proxies and librsync, for caching everything and using rsync to send deltas instead of complete pages when things change a bit. This has the potential to transform the web experience for users on slow connections. The project would be to fix up his proxy, and make a matching Firefox extension which together would form a proof of concept.	Gerv	tridge has agreed to co-mentor, but we need a Mozilla person who thinks this is cool to mentor as well.

Thunderbird

Title	Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc	Reporter	Mentor(s)	Comments
Printable CSS repository	The other day I [mentioned how cool printable stylesheets were]. I figured I'd write up an idea for a Firefox addon (or perhaps a future feature). It would make a pretty cool summer of code project (or two depending on if you split it up). The idea is not all that different from [Userstyles] or [GreaseMonkey] though intends to be easier to use. On the client side when attempting to print a page the addon would inject a printable stylesheet to make the printable output waste less paper, be more readable and just ascetically superior to raw printing. Since each site is unique if it didn't have a stylesheet for the site already it would query a central repository for stylesheets that match that url. If one or more is found it would be offered to the user as a stylesheet that could be installed and then printed with. Installing leaves a copy on the clients computer so that it could be used even in offline mode and if the repository were unavailable. On the server side of things there would obviously need to be a repository of stylesheets and a way to review and rate them. For privacy purposes I think there should be no remote loading content in the stylesheet that doesn't originate on the server which the stylesheet is for (for example a sites logo would be ok if served from the site's server). Ratings and reviews would let the better ones gravitate to the top and the poorer ones fall to the bottom. This approach is better than the more popular "select what you want to print" since it allows for not just printing a block of text, but printing web pages in a more meaningful and readable way.	Raccettura

Title	Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc	Reporter	Mentor(s)	Comments
A user-focused front-end to bug submission	Like the bugzilla helper project, but specific to thunderbird, in order to limit the scope. see bugzilla helper for some thoughts, as well as this mdat thread	DavidA	Clarkbw	See below under Bugzilla - I think that in eight weeks, a student could probably do the wider project. But I'd love to have Clarkbw help me mentor it :-) - Gerv

Calendar

Title	Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc	Reporter	Mentor(s)	Comments

Camino

Title	Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc	Reporter	Mentor(s)	Comments

SeaMonkey

Title	Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc	Reporter	Mentor(s)	Comments

Bugzilla

Title	Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc	Reporter	Mentor(s)	Comments
Better Bugzilla Helper	The current Bugzilla Helper was great for its time, but other Bugzillas have done their own step-by-step versions since which are easier to use. And people have had good ideas, like "here's a screenshot of a Thunderbird window - click on where you think the problem is" and so on. Someone needs to research what others have done, write a plan for a much better simple bug filing system, get it discussed and approved in the community, and build it.	Gerv	Gerv

L10n

Title	Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc	Reporter	Mentor(s)	Comments

Firefox Support (Sumo)

Title	Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc	Reporter	Mentor(s)	Comments

Rhino

Title	Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc	Reporter	Mentor(s)	Comments

Fennec

Title	Abstract - links to details/bugs/etc	Reporter	Mentor(s)	Comments