This morning, I received the "Congratulation" letter from google to tell me that my application to the Google Summer of Code 2006 is accepted. Although I knew I was selected as the second ranked candidate in the mentor organization I chose to submit, dojo, I am still very delighted to hear it officially from google.

The project I applied for is "RichEdit/Editor Widget Enhancement", which basically is intended to improve the WYSIWYG editor in dojo.

The idea of this project first came to my mind when I was not too happy about the situation of FCKeditor. Yes, no doubt that FCKeditor is GREAT, in almost all aspects: It is extremely feature-rich and works reasonably well in different browsers, and what’s more important, it is built on a plugin framework which makes it very friendly for developers to extend the functionality of the editor. However, it is built around the editor and does not have solid foundations. For example, it does not provide general cross-browser event handling API, which is essential for advanced DOM manipulation. In addition, the building tool (the compressor) for FCKeditor is only for windows, and it is not open source so I can not help to port it, although it is free of charge.

On the other hand, dojo provides a solid basis for cross browser javascripts, and features some advanced techniques, such as dojo event system, well enginnered ajax wrapper class. What’s more, dojo has an java based (although I do not personally like java, at least it is open source and cross platform) build system which seems to me very promising.

That almostly summerizes why I did not help to improve FCKeditor, but to apply for dojo to improve the primitive (compared to FCKeditor) editor in it.

Another contributing fact is that, FCKeditor is mostly done by one core developer (amazing, how well himself is doing it), while dojo is a well established collaborating project, which seems to be more likely to welcome new developers.

I do pay my full respect to the author of FCKeditor, and I like the editor itself very much: you can see the SJSD project I started is based on FCKeditor and I released a patch version of wordpress plugin featuring improved FCKeditor.

The aim of this SoC project is to lay a solid ground for the dojo editor to be extensible and feature rich as what FCKeditor can provide, but built on dojo.

As this project will likely occupy all my spare time, so I may have to suspend all the other open source activities, including developing SJSD and SCIM etc. However, I will try to do bug fixes in the meantime.