Finally, after a long wait, the names of the accepted projects for the 2007 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) have been released. And my project was selected ! My mentor will be David Coallier (great guy by the way !) I am very happy and unusually surprised by the news and I'm looking forward to this summer to show my talents and have fun with the Jaws and the PHP communities ! I'll keep everybody updated on a (almost) daily basis when the project is started so revisit the pages if you wonder where the project is heading ! As this is an introductory post, I joined the abstract of my project, also available on the GSoC page.

It is not a secret to anybody that big applications are the motor of the development of languages. In fact, with them, we can test the limits of the language, detect bugs and suggest ameliorations. This also applies to PHP and is even more important in a period of intense development like the one PHP is living right now.

Jaws, an incredibly powerful content management system written in PHP, is a good example of such an application. To keep its pertinence as a driving force of the PHP community, Jaws has to maintain a level of currentness with the fast-evolving PHP language. This is why it is intended in this Google Summer of Code project to revamp the internals of Jaws and migrate it from PHP 4 to PHP 6. This includes, but is not limited to, E_STRICT compliance, the systematic use of real object programming, Unicode character support, the transparent use of different database types and the use of the most current features available in PECL and PEAR, including if needed operator overload and the Standard PHP Library (SPL). This will not only improve the user experience but will also serve as a testing platform for the newest branch of the PHP project, promising the discovery of new bugs, the elaboration of new feature requests and the improvement of documentation. Overall, both the Jaws community and the PHP community will profit from this ambitious project to redesign the internals of Jaws with the most current available features of the PHP language.

This project will contain three phases. The first one is the planning of the new internals, based on the current code base. This will be done in concordance with all the current developers of the project and my mentors and will last about two weeks. The second and longest phase is the actual development of the new internals, which will last eight weeks, during which contributions to the code base will be on a daily basis. The third phase is the testing phase, where the new code base is implemented in a real-life environment and extensively tested. Feedback will also be sent to the PHP-internals list for developers to see how well PHP6 performs in such a big endeavour.