CS297/298 Project Ideas

Please contact me if you are interested in one of these projects. (Note: These are projects for students in the Computer Science Department at San Jose State University.)

All of the following projects are connected with the Scala language. One benefit of Scala is rich support for building domain-specific languages. A DSL uses special syntax that is convenient for a particular problem domain. But it is a part of Scala so that programmers don't have to learn a new language and tool chain for every specialized problem. A good example is the combinator parser library. A user who needs to parse a language learns a few simple rules about the rep opt ~ ^^ operators and then uses regular Scala for parsing.

• “Scala Server Faces:” Scala for web apps with JSF and JPA. Lift is a “convention over configuration” web framework, like Ruby on Rails, but—just like Ruby on Rails—it ends up reinventing a lot of wheels. The goal of this project is to discover how Scala can take the tedium out of JSF/JPA without reinventing the good parts.
• Scala animation framework. In a joint project with Dr. Taylor, I designed an animation framework for CS education applications. The goal of the framework was to make it easy to animate diagrams that commonly occur in CS without the tedium of Flash. The goal of this project is to make a better framework using Scala.
• Scala shell scripting. For shell programming, one has uncomfortable choices: Use Java/Scala and manually implement file handling operations, or use bash because it has a lot of the primitives that you need to process files, and then suffer through the horrid bash syntax. The purpose of this project is to produce a DSL for effective scripting of file operations, and to add features from Windows Powershell.
• Scala XSLT processing. XSLT is a powerful mechanism for transforming XML, but most casual users are utterly baffled by its syntax and semantics. The purpose of this project is to design a user-friendly library in Scala that can achieve the same purpose.
• Scala web scripting. For testing of web applications, or for automating repeated operations on tedious web UIs, one turns to programming packages such as HTTPUnit or tools such as Selenium IDE. But neither satisfies. It is very tedious to write HTTPUnit scripts, particularly since there is no recorder. And Selenium IDE has no programmability. The goal of this project is to develop a library in Scala, together with a recording facility.