Google Summer of Code

Some project ideas that might work for Google's summer of code. The Python folks have [http://wiki.python.org/moin/SummerOfCode very good advice] for submitting proposals.

Potential Mentors

FrankWierzbicki

Help System

Note: This started as a weblog post from Brian Zimmer (His weblog disappeared a long time ago, but I dug it up again through the magic of the [http://www.archive.org/web/web.php wayback machine].

One of the best features of Python IMHO is the help() function. It’s the first place I turn if I need help before I open a web browser and read the docs.

I think it would be cool if we could do this:

>>> from java.lang import String
>>> help(String)

and see the full Javadoc documentation in help format.

I think a cool project would be to create a system that could turn source code comments into a format that the Jython help system could consume (perhaps with a Doclet if you have the source -- this will become especially nice for Sun's newly GPL'ed version) in the case of classes not already exposed with the special __doc string mechanism available in Jython already.

This could be facilitated with an xdoclet like framework which when ran over a source file would produce something Jython could use at runtime. This would either be a cached file or a Java class in a special namespace. For example, if you have class a.b.c.D then maybe the class a.b.c.D_doc might have the document source available through reflection.

Of course, help() is not currently working at all in Jython -- so the first step would be to figure out why this is and fix it. Also, we need a strategy for getting the help documentation from CPython into our new style classes.