Julia’s functions for getting and setting the clipboard are currently limited to text; it would be useful to extend them to allow the transfer of other data (for example, spreadsheet data or images).
Expected Results: Extensible clipboard() and clipboard(x) functions to get and set the richest possible representation of the system clipboard data, as well as methods for specific types.
Recommended skills: Interfacing with C from Julia, clipboard APIs for different platforms. Familiarity with FileIO.jl.
Mentors: Stefan Karpinski
Julia could be a great replacement for C in Python projects, where it can be used to speed up bottlenecks without sacrificing ease of use. However, while the basic functionality for communicating with Julia exists in PyCall.jl and pyjulia, it needs to be separated out and maintained as a real Python package.
Expected Results: An easy-to-use Python package which allows Julia functions to be imported and called, with transparent conversion of data.
Recommended skills: Familiarity with both Python and Julia, especially C interop.
Mentors: Steven Johnson
Implementation of mid-level features - specifically routing, load-balancing, cookie/session handling, and authentication - in Mux.jl. The implementation should be extensible enough to allow easy interfacing with different kinds of caching, databases or authentication backends. (See Clojure/Ring for inspiration).
Expected Results: Improvements to the Mux.jl package.
Required Skills: Experience with web development.
Recommended Skills: Knowledge of various web frameworks, especially the design decisions and tradeoffs behind them.
Mentors: Mike Innes
The QML.jl package provides Julia bindings for Qt QML on Windows, OS X and Linux. In the current state, basic functionality is available, but there is room for improvement regarding integration with GLVisualize and plotting packages such as GR (see also issue 23) or Plots. Another area of work is supporting more elaborate data models.
Expected Results: Improvements to the QML.jl package along one of these lines.
Recommended Skills: Familiarity with both Julia and the QT framework.
Mentors: Bart Janssens
While many common data structures are encouraged to be implemented in packages, to encourage more experimentation, some are so basic they need to be in Base. There are a number of projects that could be done to improve the quality, performance, or usability of these builtin structures. Some ideas include:
Recommended Skills: Ability to write type-stable Julia code. Ability to find performance issues. Knowledge about data structures and related algorithms.
Mentors: Jameson Nash
Interact.jl, host of the popular @manipulate macro, is a package for interacting with Julia code using UI widgets. It currently has a couple of serious limitations:
WebIO.jl is a new package for interactive HTML output in varied web-based front-ends to Julia, namely Jupyter/IJulia, the Juno IDE, Mux, and Blink. The idea is that these front-ends will support WebIO’s display and communication API, while graphics packages like Plotls.jl or Interact.jl can build on a common counterpart display and communication API to create UIs. This means that graphics package authors need to write a widget once and it will work on all these front-ends. It also means that widgets from different packages based on WebIO.jl can be composed seamlessly.
This project involves rewriting Interact.jl using WebIO.jl to make it available on more front-ends than just IJulia.
It is a great opportunity to rethink what a package for manipulating interactive output could do. For example: can one interactively play with output from a package like Compose.jl using @manipulate or a similar construct (e.g. move a circle or draw a rectangle)? What would Compose.jl minimally have to do to support such interactions? How can Interact.jl help? Another scenario: can PlotlyJS use Interact.jl/WebIO.jl to support drill down charts so that data can be loaded lazily from Julia as and when the user requests it? Can the state of the spreadsheet from DataFrames.jl be synced with a PlotlyJS plot?…
While these are all interesting questions to consider, the scope of this package is only to provide basic widgets (such as those in Interact.jl) and re-implement the @manipulate macro on top of them.
Expected Results: A package with basic UI widgets built on top of WebIO.jl, @manipulate macro with at least the same features as it does now.
Recommended Skills: writing generic Julia code and modular JavaScript code, writing asynchronous programs in Julia. Good aesthetic sense with UIs is a bonus!
Mentors: Shashi Gowda