Thursday 3 October 2013

GSoC Wrap-Up

In case you missed my previous posts, I was working with Wikimedia on the project "Refactoring of ProofreadPage extension" as a Google Summer of Code 2013 intern. Do I have a word for the experience I've had in the last 5 months? Yes, stirring. My mentors Thomas and Thibaut have been the most wonderful mentors you could have expected. And I have fallen in love with the ProofreadPage extension and Wikisource. Well, I can go on and on about how good Wikisource and the experience was but I would prefer talking about the project here.

    The aim of the project was to refactor the code so that it was written in a more modular and cleaner way. We had aimed at separating the various components and actions as much as possible. Also, we tried to reduce the Javascript code to a bare minimum so that even if a user has disabled Javascript execution in his/her browser, the extension does not face any severe handicap and provides all the functionality.

    So, here is a recap of what has been done in the project:
1. The handling of Index and Page pages have been separated.
2. The editing system has been separated from the reading system.
3. The setup of editing system has been removed from Javascript and shifted to PHP.
4. The image on the read page which was being rendered using Javascript was also shifted to PHP.
5. The process of getting data from the database was separated from the processing of data itself.
6. The Javascript was almost completely rewritten. A lot of Javascript was rendered redundant when a       few things were moved to PHP. Also, we started using a new zooming library for the zooming               functionality in the extension.

I plan to stick to the project and integrate VisualEditor with ProofreadPage.