Student Project Ideas
If you are interested in participating in the Google Summer of Code program with wxWidgets, we have prepared a list of some potential projects you could work on below. Please see our main Summer of Code page for details on how to apply.
Please notice that this list is not exclusive, ie that you can submit proposals to work on projects which are not listed here – but please post to wx-dev mailing list to discuss them first if you plan to do this.
Notice that the projects are sorted roughly in order of their importance:
- Native SVG Rendering: Native SVG rendering for images and icons.
- wxiOS: Continue the porting project started during GSoC 2011.
- Power Management: Cross platform support for power management events.
- A couple of sound-related projects that probably should be seen as two
parts of a single project:
- Cross Platform System Sound: Provide a way to play various “system sounds”.
- PulseAudio Support: Implement
wxSoundPulseAudio-based backend for Unix systems.
- Cross Platform Animation: Finish the implementation of the animation API started during GSoC 2011.
- Several wxWebView-related projects:
- Features switches: Make wxWebView more flexible to allow using it as a general purpose display control.
- Cookies and Downloads: Add support for managing cookies and handling file downloads.
- wxRichTextCtrl RTL Support: Support right-to-left languages and BiDi in wxRichTextCtrl.
- wxAUI Native Art Providers: Make wxAUI blend in better with native rendering methods on each platform.
- wxOpenGLGraphicsContext: Create a wxGraphicsContext renderer using OpenGL for drawing.
- wxQt: Improve the port for Qt support under Linux/Android, targeting fully featured apps like wxPython Phoenix (see GSoC 2010 and 2014)
Alternatively, you could decide to select a project depending on your background, so that if you are a…
- Linux hacker – then you could be interested in cross-platform power management or system sound projects or PulseAudio support.
- Mac guru – then, in addition to the two projects above, you could be interested in wxiOS.
- Mobile enthusiast – then wxiOS could be exciting for you.
- Web/JavaScript developer – then you should have a look at one of wxWebView-related projects.
- Somebody else – tell us what could be interesting for you!
Native SVG rendering for images and icons
wxWidgets currently uses bitmaps internally for graphical objects such as toolbars and tree-like controls.
The objective of this project is to implement a method of natively rendering Scaled Vector Graphics (SVG) under at least Windows and Linux (GTK). The SVG image will be rendered to a cached bitmap that can then be integrated with graphic functions across the library.
The initial plan is to create a platform-specific wxSVGImage object which
can be rendered to a normal wxWidgets device and/or graphics context - for
example with a command such as wxDC::DrawSVG(wxSVGImage).
Windows 10 provides a simple API for SVG rendering within Direct2D. The
functions ::CreateSvgDocument() and DrawSvgDocument() may provide the
appropriate back-end within the wxWidgets MSW port.
Similarly, Linux GTK provides internal SVG handling via the Librsvg library. This API can be used to render to a Cairo canvas which is essentially the underlying wxWidgets GTK port’s graphics context.
Potential mentors
To be confirmed
Experience needed
wxWidgets, some knowledge of MSW / GTK graphics API would be an advantage.
See also
Improve wxiOS port
A previous GSoC project has created the basics of a wxWidgets port to iOS. The task for this year would be to make this port really usable and complete the missing parts.
In particular the wxiOS branch, in which all the work had been done up to now, would need to be merged into the mainline and all standard controls would need to be implemented. Note that part of this project – which ideally should be done before submitting the proposal to work on it – would consist of building the existing wxiOS sources and ascertaining its current state.
Potential mentors
Stefan Csomor, Václav Slavik
Experience needed
Familiarity with Cocoa/iOS.
See also
Power management under non-Windows platforms
wxWidgets has support for power events but it’s currently only implemented on Windows and doesn’t work for Vista and later systems right now, e.g. it’s impossible to prevent the system from suspending in this way (which was used until Windows XP) any more. The goal of this project would be to update power management support for Windows Vista/7 and, most importantly, also implement them for Linux and/or OS X. This will include devising an API which can be implemented on all platforms and actually implementing it for Windows and at least one of Linux/OS X (and ideally both).
Difficulty: 7 for either Linux or OS X, 8 if both Importance: 6
Potential mentors
Paul Cornett, Stefan Csomor
Experience needed
Linux part will require the use of DBUS and/or DeviceKit so experience using them would be handy. OS X part obviously would be easier with some prior experience with this platform (foundation level) API.
See also
Cross-platform animation support
Animations are becoming and more important in the modern UIs but are not yet supported by wxWidgets. The goal of this project would be to allow simple to use cross-platform (including falling back to suppressing animations entirely on the systems that don’t support them) API for animating parts of the program UI.
This project has been started during GSoC 2011 but never brought to completion. The goal would be to revisit the work done so far and finish the implementation of it for Windows and Cocoa.
Notice that in 2011 there was no simple way to support animation with GTK+, but if this has changed since then, working on GTK-specific implementation would be welcome too and could replace Windows or Cocoa part of this work.
Potential mentors
Bryan Petty
Experience needed
Windows, Cocoa.
More information
Cross platform support for playing system sounds
wxWidgets provides a wxBell() function which is as simple as it gets and the
wxSound class which allows sound files to be played but requires the file (or
sound data) to be present and produces the same result under all platforms
(meaning that it won’t sound good on any of them). The goal of this project
would be to provide a way to play various “system sounds” in a simple and
portable way and respecting the user settings (in particular, not play anything
at all if the sound effects are turned off).
Difficulty: 5-7 Importance: 5
Difficulty is 5 is for a minimal usable implementation, 7 for something sufficiently powerful to represent libcanberra API while still being implementable on the other platforms.
Potential mentors
Robin Dunn
Experience needed
Experience with the platforms being targeted would be welcome.
See also
- Windows example (not sure if this is the best way though)
- OS X system sound reference
- libcanberra from Freedesktop, i.e. modern Linux systems.
PulseAudio-based wxSound backend
The existing wxSound implementation uses OSS, which is deprecated and not
available any longer in the modern Linux systems. The goal of this project
would be to write a new backend, i.e. implementation of wxSound public API,
using PulseAudio (libpulse) instead.
As mention in the projects overview, it would be desirable to combine this project with the “Cross platform system sounds” one just above.
Potential mentors
Vadim Zeitlin
Experience needed
Previous Linux development experience would be useful, but probably not required.
See also
Make wxWebView more configurable
wxWebView currently works very well as a browser, but it lacks some features to allow using it in other roles. For example, to use it for displaying HTML messages in an email client, it must allow turning off support for JavaScript, plugins, Java and even automatic image display as well as allowing intercepting more events such as context menu building. We also need more control over the use of cookies, file downloading etc.
The goal of this project would be to add the necessary API to allow for such “controlled” use of wxWebView. Notice that ideally this would need to be done for all three of the existing backends, ie Internet Explorer, WebKit and Chromium, and at the very least for the first two.
Difficulty: 5-7 (depending on the number of backends) Importance: 6
Potential mentors
Steven Lamerton, Vadim Zeitlin
Experience needed
Any experience with using IID_IWebBrowser and/or WebKit would be helpful.
See also
wxWebView Cookies and Downloads
Currently wxWebView does not support cookies. This has been implemented as a GTK+ specific patch, but this is not useful for a cross-platform library. The idea here would be to implement a cross-platform API for this that supports at least GTK+, Windows, and OSX - covering “the big three” platforms usually required for new additions to wxWidgets.
Additionally, wxWebView has no way of managing file downloads. At a minimum, we would require a download request event available to be tied into, but ideally providing a full API for managing multiple downloads, and tracking status is desired.
Considering how similar these two projects are, and the approximate time required to implement both, the proposal here is to join both tasks into one potential project for Summer of Code.
Difficulty: 5-7 (depending on the number of backends) Importance: 6
Potential mentors
Steven Lamerton, Bryan Petty, Stefano Mtangoo
Experience needed
Any experience with using IID_IWebBrowser and WebKit would be helpful.
See also
Right-to-left languages support in wxRichTextCtrl
The goal is to support right-to-left languages such as Hebrew, including support for composing individual diacritics from within wxRichTextCtrl.
This will also require improving support for the entry of Unicode characters in wxWidgets globally, ie adding events for various IME actions and so would be useful even for the programs not using wxRichTextCtrl.
Potential mentors
Julian Smart, Vadim Zeitlin
Experience needed
Good knowledge of Unicode and BiDi would be helpful. Knowledge of IME under different platforms is also needed.
Native art providers for wxAUI
The goal is to make wxAUI blend in better on a set of platforms, particularly on Mac, GTK+ and Windows 7. The original wxAUI art is rather Windows XP-like and it should be possible to take colours from the current theme and apply them to wxAUI. Mostly this will be writing separate art provider classes, but occasionally it may be necessary to dig deeper into the wxAUI code.
Potential mentors
Bryan Petty
Experience needed
No platform-specific experience is needed as the art provider should behave in the same way under all platforms.
See also
- The ribbon classes, implemented as a GSoC 2009 project, has customisable art and demonstrates a Vista/Windows 7-like art mode.
- wxRendererNative documentation
wxOpenGLGraphicsContext
The goal is to create a wxGraphicsContext implementation that uses OpenGL for (2D) drawing.
Advantages over current wxGraphicsContext renderers would be hardware accelerated and consistent output on all three major platforms (Windows, Linux, OS X).
Potential mentors
Eric Jensen, Manuel Martin
Experience needed
wxWidgets, OpenGL
See also
Improve wxQt port
Previous GSoC 2010 and GSoC 2014 projects (plus several major contributions) had created an experimental wxWidgets port using Qt, initially targeted to simple applications. The task for this year would be to advance and complete the missing parts, so that the port would be full-featured enough to be used for real applications and also be used by wxPython under Linux and Android too.
The wxQt port has been already merged into the mainline with most of the standard controls implemented, but it need some maintenance due minor changes in wxWidgets and Qt, along with other possible low-level improvements (i.e. event loop).
There is a pending Pull Request needing attention, that would be a great starting point to begin with, in order to fix known issues and ascertain the project’s current state –ideally should be done before submitting the proposal–.
Also, there are some miscellaneous controls, dialogs and major features missing (including printing framework, drag and drop, etc.), see wxQt Status.
This is an ambitious project at this stage, so expect to learn a lot about technical topics like low-level multi-platform support, core desktop and mobile applications development, deep C++ programming concepts, toolkit internals, etc.
For a complete list of tentative pending issues and initial instructions see the initial Android Proof of Concept and GSoC 2014 repository.
Potential mentors
Mariano Reingart (prior GSoC student)
Experience needed
Familiarity with Qt, Linux, Android and optionally wxPython.