Thunderbird Grammar Checker 0.5 is released

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/14781/

Now it's compatible with Thunderbird 3.x. The language for checking is correlated with the Spell Checker language. Sorry for delay, but my work load can't give me enough time to support it well.

Future plans:
  • Support inline highlighting. Backend is almost ready, but there are some problems with frontend - I just don't know how to properly modify DOM of the opened message compose window. Looks like I have to use/hook some JS-events, but my current research gives nothing.
  • Move to After The Deadline server instead of LT server-mode. LT is integrated to AtD server (see the News section on http://www.languagetool.org/). However, there is a problem with the current AtD server - it doesn't work locally now: http://openatd.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/217. Until they fix the problem, I can't recommend to use it.
  • Implement pure JS-based Grammar Checker engine. See below the notes.
All of these require some time and efforts, and I gladly accept all the help for contributing in this addon.

An example of LanguageTool rule:
<rule>
    <pattern mark_to="-1">
        <token postag="SENT_START"></token>
        <token>this</token>
        <token regexp="yes">are|were</token>
    </pattern>
    <message>Did you mean <suggestion>these</suggestion>?</message>
    <short>Grammatical problem</short>
    <example type="correct">These are errors.</example>
    <example correction="These" type="incorrect"><marker>This</marker> are errors.</example>
</rule>

As you can see, it is required to support XML parsing, regular expressions and FSM capabilities. All of these can be done in JavaScript, so it's matter only of time and efforts to create pure JS-based engine. As soon as it is implemented, all the dependencies from LT or AtD can be removed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Web application framework comparison by memory consumption

Memory consumption is slightly specific to my area of software development now, but I did some research recently and maybe these results can be useful for others. Of course, I know that precious comparison is very difficult to carry out, but actually I needed only overall picture. And let me admit that results are pretty interesting and even frustrated (at least for me). As a basis I took so-starving project, and measured initial RSS (Resident Set Size) of the each process (local development webservers). Platform: x86_64 Linux (latest Ubuntu with all updates). As a reference, here is the RSS of the interpreters in interactive console mode: Interpreter Version RSS (kB) stackless python 2.6.4 3916 ruby (via irb) 1.8.7 4664 python 2.7.1 5624 php 5.3.5 6924 v8 (via node.js shell) 2.5.9.9 8796 One more reference - the most simplest WSGI app ( example  in the Python documentation). It's RSS: 7336 Kb , so I assume it's almost impossible to consume l
Read more

Trac Ticket Workflow

Trac is the wiki and issue tracking system that is the most used for my software development projects. Let me share few hints about its ticket workflow, especially about the statuses, the roles of the participants, and let me give an example of the workflow config. But if you are interested in other things like Trac plugins, source browser, customizing, etc, let me know. All the information given below regards the workflow described at the end of the article. The original Trac workflow is missed vital features like the support for ticket verifying, or the required ticket statuses range, so I do not use it in my projects. The description of the main statuses: new - the ticket has been created; in-progress - the developer has began to work with the ticket; fixed - the ticket is fixed (the problem issued in the ticket is solved); verified - the ticket is verified (tester or PM has verified that the ticket is fixed correctly); closed - the ticket is closed (it's not
Read more

Python vs JS vs PHP for embedded systems

UPDATE (07/18/17): The original article was written in 2011 and pretty much outdated, I've updated the numbers and conclusions. I've got a question about which programming language is preferable for the website development for embedded systems (with limited resources). Here is my small investigation in a table form. Please note that the question was about only these 3 programming languages - there are better candidates for the embedded systems now (for example, Rust). The Memory and Performance overhead numbers are based on the n-body benchmark and calculated as relatives to "C gcc #4" measurements. Python 3 Node.js PHP Memory Overhead x7.62 x29.04 x8.53 Type System Strong Typing Weak Typing Weak Typing Vulnerabilities 220 1411 5626 Performance Overhead x78.31 x2.82 x30.12 Documentation Excellent Excellent Average C Bindings Excellent Average Poor Code Readability With PEP8 it can be almost perfect ESLint enforces very good style PEAR Coding Stan
Read more