Ideas for projects

[Phillip Bowden]

I feel that I've learned the language pretty well, but I'm having
trouble thinking of a medium to large project to start. What are some
projects that you have written in the past with Python?

 

[Mike Meyer]

I feel that I've learned the language pretty well, but I'm having
trouble thinking of a medium to large project to start. What are some
projects that you have written in the past with Python?

Why start with a medium to large project when you can do something
beneficial to the Python community at large.

The most immediately useful thing to do is to follow the bugs link on
the python home page, and look for bugs in the standard libraries. Add
a test case to that libraries test code (lib/python2.X/test/...) to
test for the bug, then try and fix it. When you've done that, add
patches to the bug report.

That's not only useful, but you spend time working on code that is
pythonic, so you'll learn how the language is used instead of just
what the language is.

<mike

 

[Phillip Bowden]

Why start with a medium to large project when you can do something
beneficial to the Python community at large.

The most immediately useful thing to do is to follow the bugs link on
the python home page, and look for bugs in the standard libraries. Add
a test case to that libraries test code (lib/python2.X/test/...) to
test for the bug, then try and fix it. When you've done that, add
patches to the bug report.

That's not only useful, but you spend time working on code that is
pythonic, so you'll learn how the language is used instead of just
what the language is.

<mike

I hadn't thought of that, that's a good idea. Thank you.

 

[Fuzzyman]

I feel that I've learned the language pretty well, but I'm having
trouble thinking of a medium to large project to start. What are some
projects that you have written in the past with Python?

I'm the maintainer of several python projects. Most of them have
their current homepage at
http://www.voidspace.org.uk/atlantibots/pythonutils.html

(soon to move though)



My *main* current interest is writing python CGIs - online tools.
There are a couple of projects I really want to do, but haven't had
the time. If you are interested I could support you in working on
these.



The first one is an online bookmarks manager. There are various of
these around - but none in python and none as straightforward as I
would like. It would be easy to get something working and then expand
it to do more things (like import bookmarks from IE/mozilla/firefox,
check links, organise folders etc). I could give you a section on
voidspace - complete with FTP login and python 2.3.4 - if you
wanted.



An alternative project (not online) is a 'simple version control'
program. I've written a set of libraries and a GUI tool that do
directory syncing. The libraries are called FSDM and the GUI tool is
called DirWatcher. It can snapshot directories and then work out any
changes. I use it for keeping directories in sync in the three
different computers I use.



It would be relatively simple for turning this into a tool that
monitored projects for you. You could 'snapshot' a set of folders
and label that as version 0.1. You could track changes and allow the
rolling back of individual files, or even a whole project to a previous
version. Again I could offer you every support (work with you
effectively). I would also like to change the data format of saved
files from my own text markup to XML. There is a very nice library
called XMLobject that will read & write XML - so it should be simple,
but I don't have the time. It would make an excellent little version
control system for small projects with individual developers.
Anyway, whatever you do, good luck.



Regards,





Fuzzyman

 

[Paul Rubin]

I feel that I've learned the language pretty well, but I'm having
trouble thinking of a medium to large project to start. What are some
projects that you have written in the past with Python?

Why don't you say what areas interest you, and how much experience you
have with programming in general. That will help choose a response.
Most programmers who have been at it for a while, don't have trouble
thinking of projects. They have far more ideas than they can ever
possibly get around to working on.

 

[Mike Meyer]

Phillip Bowden wrote:
The first one is an online bookmarks manager. There are various of
these around - but none in python and none as straightforward as I
would like. It would be easy to get something working and then expand
it to do more things (like import bookmarks from IE/mozilla/firefox,
check links, organise folders etc). I could give you a section on
voidspace - complete with FTP login and python 2.3.4 - if you
wanted.

My online bookmark manager - written in Python - has been around for
seven or eight years. See <URL: http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/hotlist/

for details.

<mike

 

[Jeff Shannon]

Here is something I would try but don't have the guts for:

If you could write an extension to idle (yes, idle, not Boa, not
Eric, etc) that pops up a small list of possible completions in a
listbox when you type a '.' (period) after any object name or module
name (including builtins), that would be *awesome*. I have been very
spoilt by Delphi in this regard. Some kind of code that does partial
compiles in the background to analyse code for members would be sweet.

Even duplicating the PythonWin completion code for IDLE would be handy,
I'd think. It's not exceptionally smart about finding complete names ,
but it can still help considerably. (I think it only looks at imported
modules, and textual scans of the current file, so it doesn't
automatically recognize new attributes of class instances, and it
doesn't always recognize the type of an object (to refer to class def
for attributes). But if the current file was previously imported, then
it'll offer completion for those attributes that existed at the time of
import...)

Stage one could be to borrow PythonWin's name-finding code, and write a
UI to use that code in IDLE. An optional stage two could then be
rewriting the name-finding code to be smarter.

Jeff Shannon
Technician/Programmer
Credit International

 

[Caleb Hattingh]

Here is something I would try but don't have the guts for:

If you could write an extension to idle (yes, idle, not Boa, not Eric,
etc) that pops up a small list of possible completions in a listbox when
you type a '.' (period) after any object name or module name (including
builtins), that would be *awesome*. I have been very spoilt by Delphi in
this regard. Some kind of code that does partial compiles in the
background to analyse code for members would be sweet.

 

[Terry Hancock]

I feel that I've learned the language pretty well, but I'm having
trouble thinking of a medium to large project to start. What are some
projects that you have written in the past with Python?

I would recommend going to Sourceforge and doing a search for
projects that list Python as their programming language. You'll
find lots of open source projects in Python, and maybe a few you'd
be interested in pursuing. There are lots of projects that need
help, and some are quite fascinating projects, depending on your
interests.

http://sourceforge.net/

You might also want to try the same sort of thing at

http://nongnu.org/

Except there, they shoot you if you say "open source", even if
you are in fact using the GPL license, as I found out the hard
way. Fair warning.

Cheers,
Terry

 

[John Hunter]

Phillip> I feel that I've learned the language pretty well, but
Phillip> I'm having trouble thinking of a medium to large project
Phillip> to start.

Some of these may be on the "large" side, but

- Provide a full-feature, mostly specification complete python pdf
parser.

- Write a proper python package manager that recursively handles
dependencies across platforms (CPAN/apt-get for python).

- Enhance GUI integration. Ie, allow python code targetting one GUI
environment to be used in a different one (contribute to anygui?)

- Add 3D graphics to matplotlib (nudge, nudge, my own project).
Integrate VTK?

- Contribute a full-featured wavelets analysis package for python

- Add internationalization support to your favorite python package
which lacks it.

- Add client side python support to mozilla and/or XUL

- Write a python app that crawls python-list USENET posts looking for
book or GUI-toolkit recommendations and automatically responds with
links to FAQs and google groups. Be sure to include "google is
your friend" in every response.

- Contribute to the ipython rewrite effort so that python finally has
an interactive shell across platforms worth its salt that has a
chance of being included in the standard library.

- Solve the problems with the global interpreter lock and give python
a proper security model that will satisfy everyone with a hardcore
Java and C++ background. Implement a proper Rational class and
support date string formatting over the range of dates that the
datetime module supports. Provide a full featured timezone module
for the standard library. Support compile time type identification
for runtime optimizations.

If any or all of these have already been done, my apologies to the
respective authors.

JDH

 

[Nemesis]

Mentre io pensavo ad una intro simpatica "Phillip Bowden" scriveva:

I feel that I've learned the language pretty well, but I'm having
trouble thinking of a medium to large project to start. What are some
projects that you have written in the past with Python?

Hmm I wrote this:
1) Internet Timer (it counts the time you are connected to Internet)
2) MultiSetiWatch (reads the state of multiple SETI clients)
3) XPN (it is a newsreader, I'm still writing it)

I've always worked on things that interested me or things I needed.