[daisy] [GSoC] applying for the development of a .NET library for Daisy

[Marc Portier]

Cyberchand wrote:
>> But again: excellent idea! Please continue your investigation and let
>> this list know your findings.
> 
> Hi,
> 
> here is a very first shot of my proposal :
> http://cocoondev.org/daisyscratchpad/g5/391-cd.html
> 

cool,

in general there seems to be some conditional wording in your proposal
that makes it a bit vague on what you're actually committing yourself to

I understand of course this is just a first shot, and a more detailed
plan of attack will need to be built, but don't let some polite way of
wording make us think you don't have an opinion or clue :-)

I also have to admit that a lot of the .net and ms related stuff doesn't
directly ring bells in my head, so anything you can provide as more
tangible examples of what 'could' be achieved would clearly help me
understand.

oh, and it looks like you created a "Simple Document" rather then a
"Community Wiki Document", the latter allows you to add a 'category'
which will automatically make it popup at the right locations...



in practice here is just a list of the questions popping up:
(answering all of them in detail might bring you too far, it's more
important that you catch the underlying message and address that)

* how and when are you planning to learn DaisyCMS (have you discovered
the +300 page manual yet? how much of it is read and known? where do you
(think you will) need help to understand? how to organize that? have you
built from source/installed and tested the current Daisy?)

* how much time do you think you need to really just do the groundwork
of making the remote API implementation available in C# (do you really
think there is going to be time any/all of the suggested clients?)

* and more importantly how can that work be fitted into the daisy
development process in such a way that in future new features in the API
will easily get their C# counterpart (make us confident to include you
results)

* I didn't know about the Language Conversion tool (is it free/open?)
and it looks like a viable and direct way towards solving the issue.
However my personal idea would have been to rather provide some wsdl
like description for our rest based API and let the standard wsdl
interpretation and code generatrion stuff take it from there. (I admit I
haven't thought this through, I'm sharing my naive thoughts, your
comments and insight is appreciated)

* also, the use of the tool lets you spontaneously talk in terms of
'folders' you are going to convert... from a pure API vision of things
I'ld rather get some feeling of packages
(http://cocoondev.org/javadoc/daisy/2.0/index.html) that are going to be
available to remote .Net/C# clients

* which triggers my interest around: is there a javadoc counterpart to
be expected? (in turn this also triggers the advise to plan some time
'documenting' and 'raising community awareness and testing' for your
project) --> you don't need to be doing all this yourself, but if not
you sure need a plan on how you think to be mobilising the group to do
it :-)

* I would also be interested to learn which mono/.net machinery people
are going to need to (resp.) compile/test/run this stuff

* About the proposed clients (windows gui, asp.net based wiki, ms office
plugins) you mentioned: which ones do you really think are adding value?
which ones do you plan on working on? can you provide some use cases or
propsed views for any of those? which one would you really need as the
killer app that ensures continued interest to keep the c# package up to date

* How do you ensure this C# API implementation can be maintained beyond
your time on it during the gsoc project?




> Thanks for your interest,
> 

(please also see my comments to the other student's email)


before you misinterpret my feedback:
- I really think your first shot is what a first shot should look like:
it shows you thought about things and you've actually started doing things
- you're also giving spontaneous feedback on what you did and the next
steps you plan to take
- and since you promise that any feedback will be influencing your
proposal... :-)


regards,
-marc=