Here's the thing. jQuery, along with plugins, covers a lot of what other libraries do. I just went looking around in dojo and YUI, and while one can do most of what they do by combining plugins, what's missing is the kind of bullet-proofing that people Alex Russell and Eric Miraglia have gotten into their respective libraries by way tight management. jQuery's whole philosphy runs counter to that, with a real spirit of "roll your own". It's led to some very cool and unlikely plugins, but they're not all necessarily as stable as the core is.
So, one thing I propose is that we take a list of plugins/functionalities that we want to have "officialized", and have one of the programmers that we get from SoC to just do a thorough review, squish all bugs, test on all supported platforms, and add some cool enhancements. One example: Kelvin Luck's date picker is a good calendar control implementation. But, it does still require some work, and it's also not as flexible as Yahoo's calendar (although, one might argue that Yahoo's level of calendar features aren't necesarily desirable...) Also, there's a lot of work that Interface can use, even though it gets better every day. Sometimes, it seems like Stefan and Paul don't have enough hands. This isn't a complaint, I'm just saying that they'd probably appreciate as much help as they can get. Interface is big. Ideally, I'd like to see this: After the pick-a-plugin system is deployed, I should be able to go in and almost create a drop-in replacement for any other popular library that's out there today, and get at least that library's level of hardness and fidelity. For example: if I like the YUI widgets, but I want to use jQuery, I should be able to check off Core+Calendar+Interface+Menu, and I have something that's not only as complete feature-wise as YUI, but something that's just as bug-free and cross-browser. Unfortunately, testing and hardening aren't the "cool" part of programming. But, it's something that I think the whole project would really benefit from. As for any other "little" features I'd like to see, I could use a good time-picker control, and support for more advanced XPath selectors. If you're looking for something "big" and new, perhaps a port of Jack Slocum's layout stuff? That might take more than an summer, though. :) This is all just stuff to think about. I'm going pie-in-the-sky here. - Brian > Hey Everyone - > > Google's Summer of Code has just opened up for 2007, and I'd love to > have jQuery be a part of it: > http://code.google.com/soc/ > > If you're not familiar with how SoC works, Google pays a number of > college students to work on an open source project for an entire > summer. This is a great opportunity for the kids, and for the projects > that they're supporting. > > In order to be able to apply, we'd have to come up with a list of > things that we'd like them to do. So, I'm asking you (the jQuery > community) what you think 1-3 decent coders could do for us for a > summer? > > Some examples of good ideas (which should be expanded upon): > - Build or port an unobtrusive charting plugin > - Add jQuery support to a popular CMS/Framework > - Build some interactive demos for jQuery.com > - Add new functionality to Interface > > We're already working on the following improvements to the web site > (so you don't need to ask for these): > - A new plugins repository > - A new forum area > - A customizable download area > > Feel free to post your suggestions - all are welcome! > > --John _______________________________________________ jQuery mailing list [email protected] http://jquery.com/discuss/
