[Haskell-cafe] open-source project looking for novice help?

[Chris Wong]

Hi Richard,

On Sat, Nov 8, 2014 at 7:40 AM, Richard Eisenberg <eir at cis.upenn.edu> wrote:
> I'm teaching an introductory Haskell course this semester
> (http://cis.upenn.edu/~cis194/fall14/) and am about to assign students their
> final project. Is there anyone out there who would welcome getting some
> novice help on an open-source project? You certainly don't need to commit to
> accept their patch(es), but I know it would be a great experience for some
> of the students to contribute to the "real" world of Haskell, instead of
> just doing exercises. You can get an accurate summary of what we've covered
> by looking at the lecture titles at
> http://cis.upenn.edu/~cis194/fall14/lectures.html
>
> Students will be choosing projects starting next week, and will need to have
> them completed by Dec. 15 or so. A good project is about 20 hours of work.

Hope I'm not too late to chime in!

I maintain a GUI testing package called Robot [1]. It's a simple
library with clear semantics which seems quite suitable for your
students.

Some project ideas, from easiest to hardest:

* Taking screenshots. XHB exposes a GetImage call [2]; it shouldn't be
too much work integrating that into the library.

* Adding a configurable delay between operations. This involves some
work with monads (ReaderT specifically).

* Windows and Mac support. Some good practice with Cabal and the FFI here.

* xdotool [3] does a few things, like searching for windows by title,
that I'd like to see in Robot. Porting some of these features over
sounds like a good (albeit open-ended) project.

Hope this helps.

Chris

[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/robot
[2] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/xhb-0.5.2014.4.10/docs/Graphics-XHB-Gen-Xproto.html#v:getImage
[3] http://www.semicomplete.com/projects/xdotool/