My name is Soren Berg and I wanted to propose a possible Google Summer of Code project and see what you guys think.
I would like to use GSoC '09 to improve the scripting API of Inkscape.
This is an area that has seen some major changes over the last few years in terms of extension support and verb passing but I still believe there is room for improvement.
The extensions are very useful for making filters but don't (correct me if I'm wrong) really expose any of Inkscape's functionality. You need to use an entirely different set of tools to manipulate the XML data and pass it back.
The verbs are very useful for batch processing and similar tasks, but the fact that none of them take any parameters or return results means that they are not ideal for scripting or otherwise interacting with Inkscape in a more in-depth fashion.
I wrote a scripting console that exposed many Inkscape functions for programatically creating images and it was accepted for inclusion but it became harder and harder to support, largely because of the lack of any sort of API. It did show some very interesting benefits to controlling Inkscape programatically (like script-fu for the GIMP) though.
I know there is some work going on with a Java based API but it seems to be mostly stubs right now.
I could start working on this early as well since I have a job that wants to integrate software with Inkscape.
What do you guys think? Obviously I haven't fleshed out my plans very much, and that is because I want to get some general feedback on the concept first.
Thank you for reading, Soren Berg