GSoC Project: Improve coala Website and Supporting Tools

[Hemang Kumar]

Helloo coalians! I'm Hemang Kumar, I'm doing Computer Science and Engineering in New Delhi, India. I am working on the project Improve coala Website and Supporting Tools.

Here is the overview of the project, this project aims to increase the user base of coala and provide a web based interface to use coala on their projects. The project is conceptually built upon various previous projects (coala-gui, coala-html) which have helped us refine, redefine and revisit our GUI approach.

By providing first time users a one click interface to obtain a coafile online and to run coala at coala.io on their projects by two means, by pasting the code in the given editor box, and by pasting the link to their GitHub repository in a link box. This will help them to get started with coala very easily.

The next thing where the project will help us is that it will provide an effective bear search mechanism on coala.io by improving the current one, and this will benefit first time users and developers alike.  Its this one tool where we will type the name of language or aspect on which the user wants to do analysis, and the appropriate bears would be filtered and displayed.

For the community, having all the web interfaces and UI elements in one place will provide a great headstart to any web project in the community. Apart from that, this project will help projects.coala.io become configurable. With these implemented, those who have their use cases similar to ours will easily be able to integrate these UI components with just one link, and get a projects page of their own in seconds.

Goals of the Project

• Stable coala Online on coala.io
  
  Relevant Issues - coala/landing#35,  coala/landing#36  
  
  A fully functional interface exists to run coala online. Creating a new interface in which users can select bears, enter the values for its non optional settings and Adding support for linting of online repositories in browsers. For this goal to be complete and module to be stable, these objectives need to be fulfilled,

• Bears with non optional settings can be used and result is returned.

• Incase of any kind of errors encountered, for example while receiving results in frontend or while making request to backend to run coala, a relevant error message is shown rather than a standard message like being done presently. Substantially, In case the module breaks, it will leave proper clues to determine what went wrong.

• Validation exists for user input, for example, while asking users for max_line_length setting, the input can only be an integer. If any other data type is entered, then a error message is displayed showing the expected input type and given input type.

• Write tests to exercise all the functionality and edge cases.
  
  

• Configurable projects.coala.io

Relevant Issues - coala/projects#63

This involves making projects repository completely configurable so that other  organizations can set it up with minimal effort.
On the successful completion of the project, projects.coala.io repository will serve as an extensible and modular framework and portal for project showcase and management.

• coala CSS Framework

A CSS framework exists which will be our centralized resource for all the components for use in web projects at coala.

• Enhanced coala-html

User should be able to filter results on basis of various parameters like bears and severity, additionally all features of coala Online module is integrated into coala-html Design is consistent with coala.io.

I’m constantly working towards refinement and redesign of these ideas and scheduling dyuring the ongoing communnity bonding period, If you feel I can improve in the choice of tools or improve in the approache towards solutions, please do get in touch, I’m always up on Gitter, and I go by the username @hemangsk in General coala Chatroom.
Blog : http://hemangsk.github.io