I thought I would throw out a couple of project ideas that might be fun
to work on; as I don't know most of you, it's pretty hard for me to get a
project group together other than by emailing you all. If others of you
are looking for people to work with, maybe this mailing list would be a
good forum to work out a project. Of course, the TF's might also want to
reply with respect to the plausabilty of these ideas as project topics.
The first idea is to implement some kind of distributed development for
Java application (not applet) development. We could assume the existance
of a filesystem, and devise protocols for managing the development process,
recompilig strategies, etc. I'd like to try to involve Remote Method
Invocation to make some of the ugly aspects of this more transparent.
Number two would be to play with a web server, either Apache or the
Perl-HTTPd, and experiment with adding revision control methods to the HTTP
command set. There is an internet working group for this topic, and they
have some ideas, but it's by no means a closed topic. In addition to
revision management, there's the question of how to do (distributed)
software devlopment on top of such a system. There's also the fun topic of
distributed document development.
Then there's finding some mixture of the two; for example, it might be
much more reasonable to do Java development over the web, since object
files and applications are all in the same format (Java bytecode). Some
info on this stuff is in the handouts on "Booster," "WebMake," and "Java
RMI" from today.
Please drop me a line if you're interested in this or other projects.
Thanks for listening!
//James//