Google Summer of Code 2013 was a resounding success for phpMyAdmin. All six of our students finished their projects and their code is merged with the phpMyAdmin codebase and will be part of the upcoming 4.1 release. phpMyAdmin is a free software tool written in PHP, intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the Web. phpMyAdmin supports a wide range of operations on MySQL, MariaDB and Drizzle.
Students Bin Zu and Supun Nakandala refactored many scripts this summer. All the scripts in the Server view and those regarding the SQL executor, along with scripts dealing with the table structure were cleaned up. Code was moved into functions, variable names were improved, and one of the students wrote unit tests for his newly-created functions.
Through Google Summer of Code, Kasun Chathuranga worked on implementing new feature requests and improving the user interface of phpMyAdmin.
Mohamed Ashraf has successfully contributed an error reporting tool to the phpMyAdmin code base. The tool will aid end users in reporting JavaScript-related issues and help phpMyAdmin developers deliver fixes for such issues quicker.
Ayush Chaudhary and Adam Kang were selected for the Automated Testing project. While writing unit tests for string manipulation functions in phpMyAdmin, one of the students identified that the functions were not implemented in a way that would facilitate unit testing and went on to refactor them to add new classes before writing unit tests for them. Selenium tests for interface testing were also added this summer. Existing tests were migrated to Selenium2 and helper classes were added that are needed to write Selenium tests. Overall the test coverage of phpMyAdmin has increased.
Some of the students are still around fixing bugs, we look forward to more contributions from them in the future.
Thanks to Google Summer of Code, we again had great contributions and improvements to the phpMyAdmin project. Now that GSoC 2014 has been announced, we can start preparing for the next application period and will hopefully be able to have another awesome summer of coding and mentoring.
By Dieter Adriaenssens, phpMyAdmin organization administrator
