2008Q3 Grant Proposal: Bavl

Authors
John Beppu
Pip Stuart

Title
Bavl (pronounced "bah-vell", as Tower of "Babel" in Hebrew)

Synopsis
Bavl is a Free (GPLv3'd) web application for collaboratively learning how to comprehend && speak foreign languages. At its core, it is a system for searching through a database of words, phrases, or lessons each accompanied by translations. However, instead of just presenting mere text back, each phrase also can have one or more audio recordings associated with it. This will let people actually HEAR how to correctly enunciate unfamiliar words (even in a visitor's native language), including valid alternatives, such as the silent or hard "t" in the English word "often". This feature will provide a tremendous benefit to anyone interested in improving their spoken-language skills (i.e., Scholars, Pupils, Students, Learners, etc. of Languages && Social Sciences).

In addition to learning, helping others to learn will be easy too. The UI is designed to encourage multi-lingual contributors to publicly offer literal or figurative translations, native pronunciations, answer questions, provide lesson plans, advice, && pupil feedback. Audio recording && playback will be implemented using embedded Adobe Flash-based widgets (via haXe) within the pages of Bavl.

Benefits to the Perl community
Bavl is good for the Perl community, because it is good for all of humanity... but Bavl is especially beneficial for our particular subset of humanity; as Perl hackers, we share reverence of linguistic mastery, && as individuals, we tend to say, interpret, && do things in more than many ways that might seem equivalent, yet they remain subtly distinct. These common ideologies among Perl hackers seperates us from other programming communities, no matter our citizenship or native language - our distinctive features are reflected through the characteristics of Perl (our common language). We Perl hackers value our ability to cultivate && creatively express diverse visions within Perl's gracefully expansive language. We hope Bavl will encourage the celebration of pioneers of all linguistic frontiers, enabling neophytes and visionaries alike to increase knowledge && multiply wisdom fruitfully.

Humanity has always struggled to communicate effectively; our often celebrated && widely diverse cultures && languages lead to misunderstandings && inhibited progress because we lack a widely available, && contextually accurate, translation system. We consider Bavl to be a compelling solution to this fundamental problem, because of its inherent simplicity and ubiquitous applicability. As a universally accessible system, Bavl represents the dominant mechanism for language learning of the future.

If Bavl achieves even a small level of global success, it stands to dramatically improve international, intercultural, && interpersonal relations by lessening misunderstandings && cultural ignorance. The Perl community's affinity for linguistics could become a sort of contagious vaccination among all peoples. Someday, the masses might have fun adopting new languages, increasing vocabularies, && teaching philosophies with cross-culturally eloquent accuracy. Plus, Perl hackers would enjoy learning desired languages through an underlying system built primarily from their favorite programming language. This is the human aspect of Bavl's benefits.

On the technical side, Bavl will promote the awareness && understanding of a few new && interesting technologies.

Bavl will be using a Perl module called Continuity, due to its ability to handle many concurrent && long-lived HTTP connections. This provides the technical foundation necessary to implement COMET-based soft-realtime updates on web pages. Thus, Bavl would inform people of the existence of this useful Perl module && give them a potent example of how it can be put to great use.

Bavl will be using CouchDB for storage. Since CouchDB suggests it could become a compelling alternative to relational databases, we intend to determine whether certain application data-sets are substantially easier to express through CouchDB than with a traditional relational database.

Finally, Bavl will alert the Perl community to the existence of haXeVideo, which is a Free (GPL'd) streaming Flash media server. This will let the Perl community know that if you want to stream audio or video content via Flash, it can be done without purchasing a prohibitively expensive media server from Adobe. You still have to pay for bandwidth, though. ;-)

Our hope is that the entirety of the Bavl project will reinvigorate the Perl community && inspire other ambitious && prodigious projects to follow.

Deliverables

• a Bavl Perl module distribution will be uploaded to the CPAN
• Bavl will be deployed to HTTP://Towr.of.Bavl.Org/

Project Details

Its technical foundation is as follows:

• CouchDB will be used for storage.
• haXeVideo will be used for streaming Flash audio.
• haXe will be used to implement the Flash player && recorder widgets.
• Squatting will be used as the app's MVC framework, && it'll be running (or squatting) on top of Continuity.
• Locale::Maketext will be used for i18n && l10n.
• The Google Language API will be used to do some automatic translation of text (but this functionality may not make it to the first release).

The web application itself will start off with a fairly simple layout. The major controllers of this app are as follows:

• Home -- This will display a list of the most recently added phrases.
• Learning -- The vision for this is that you'd select 2 languages -- one that you know, && one that you'd like to learn. Then you'd be presented with a search prompt where you could ask the system how to say a phrase. When you get results back, you'll also get a chance to hold on to the phrase for future reference, && this will let you build a collection of related phrases.
• Lesson -- The collection of phrases you built while using the Learning controller can be turned into a Lesson. Lessons are a collection of phrases that should have a cohesive theme.
• Chat -- I eventually want to have some chat-like functionality, so that people who are interested in the same languages can actually chat with each other while they're using the site. It'll be like the Chatter Box on HTTP://PerlMonks.Org/ but way more responsive, because we'll be using Continuity.
• Profile -- If you register an account on the site, you'll get a profile page that gives you a summary of all that you've contributed to the system. It'll also present you with a feed of questions that you may be able to answer for other people (because you've told the system that you know how to speak a certain language).

Project Schedule
We've already started building the core pieces of this project. Beppu-san wrote an MVC framwork called Squatting, because he's a big fan of the Camping framework from the Ruby world, && we wanted to have access to a similar API for building Bavl. He's also written a non-blocking CouchDB client called AnyEvent::CouchDB that will be uploaded to the CPAN soon.

The major pieces that left are:

• (1 week) The Flash-based audio playing widget.
• (1 week) The Flash-based audio recording widget.
• (5-7 weeks) The actual web application that brings everything together.
• (1 week) Deployment of the web application.

Biography

Beppu: I am a programmer who has been using Perl for 10 years, now. However, for the last 2 years, I took a trip into the worlds of Ruby && JavaScript to see what they had to offer. I have recently returned to Perl, because I decided that it was time to implement the idea for a language learning site that my friend && I have been sitting on, && I believed that Perl (the language created by our favorite linguist/programmer) would be the most appropriate tool for the job.

Pip: I'm JAPH who loves to learn, dream, && design ambitious things that I don't always quite know how to do all the needed work for... which is why Beppu-san && I make a solid team. I've always hacked at HP48GX calculators, early x86 asm, low-level graphics && 3D, which led to my decade-long career in game-development. I have contributed Free Software to facilitate better tools, data-formats, && interoperability among games whenever I could. I too believe Perl is the most appropriate language for our Bavl project to bloom.

Amount Requested
$4,095.63