This post is an introductory post to my GSoC 2015 project. I have been working for about 2 months now on coala(COde AnaLysis Application). It is basically a static code analysis application. So far, coala offers an easy to use CLI interface wherein users are prompted for input and actions, as and when required. This accounts for a streamlined and hassle-free experience. I have started working on a GUI for coala, which i feel will have the following benefits for the developer community:

A GUI offers a faster and more efficient way to use coala. It will have many features which will help coala users perform their static code analysis with greater speed and have a more stylised way to look at the results and perform actions on them. A GUI provides a more visual means of performing actions and is therefore, easier to use. Hence, a coala GUI would help new developers joining the open source community to focus on analysing their code without the added complication of getting acquainted with the command line interface. Another marquee feature that coala has up and coming is code clone detection. Providing a streamlined interface for an important task such as code clone detection is in my opinion very useful, especially when it is language independent.

I have begun work on the GUI and have very rough mockups and a very trivial non functioning app ready for it. The GUI is being developed in pyGTK+3. The GUI is following a very familiar design paradigm that all GNOME applications have. I’m taking cues from GNOME builder, music and boxes etc. for the design and development of the application. Here are some sample images of the GUI attached:



For more information about the project you can refer to my proposal here : http://udayan12167.github.io/gsoc-proposal/

You can find out more about coala at : https://github.com/coala-analyzer/coala

To fiddle around with the GUI you can check out the wip/udayan/guiproto branch.

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

Until next time! Buh Bye!