[Xapian-devel] Summer of Code help

[Olly Betts]

Hi Anish,

On Sat, Feb 22, 2014 at 05:47:44PM +0530, Anish Kanchan wrote:
> I wish to participate in the Google Summer of Code program. I good at Java,
> PHP and C++. I went through all the projects and I feel that the skills
> required for Bindings Improvement project closely match mine.
> 
> I would like to solve any existing bugs in this project if they exist.

This is an issue with the java bindings (on trunk) which shouldn't be
complex to solve:

http://trac.xapian.org/ticket/616

If you've not used SWIG before, that would be a relatively gentle
introduction to it.

> Also, could you please tell me which other areas I'll have to do research
> on in order to be fit to implement this project. This would then enable me
> to write an effective proposal as well.

Do you have an idea which language(s) you'd want to work on?

There's not a huge number of things to do for Java, so that alone is
probably too lightweight a project, and you'd probably want to combine
it with something else (which doesn't have to be related).

The PHP project idea is a lot more substantial, since it involves
updating how SWIG wraps PHP code.  A good way to learn more about
that would probably be to try wrapping a Xapian class or two by hand
using the PHP API we want to change SWIG to use:

http://devzone.zend.com/1435/wrapping-c-classes-in-a-php-extension/

Once you have a hand-written wrapper, you can work towards making SWIG
generate the same code.

Cheers,
    Olly