Friday

Andrew

I discussed the design and functionality of the toolset selector and editor with Catherine, Milena, and Matt. We decided to remove the toolset bar and related animation, and change the toolset editor to a horizontal layout. We decided to leave the toolset steps toolbar as text labels for the immediate future, with the understanding that this would be changed to a panel with icons.

I removed the toolset panel, and added constraints to the drag n droppable items, so that they can't be dragged off-screen.

I worked on a search component with Alejandro and made some decent progress.

I discussed the middleware entities with Amit and James, and we tried to come up with calls for storing and retrieving user preferences.

Matt B.

My main goals for the weekend were css encapsulation, component encapsulation, and making the workbench look like Milena's sketches.

CSS Encap - First stage was to move all css into a PHP include then trim out things (we still have 4 css files) as I work on the css for the sketches. This was somewhat derailed by Amit's declaration that PHP is the devil. When I commit my changes (hopefully Monday), we will be back to the original method (hand-crafted css links in the html) with fewer css files. Some thought went into the component-level css, but basically, that will only result in a very simple template. Component developers can do almost whatever they like with the css. The only non-PHP method to stop them (which Andrew found in JS)

Component Encap - First stage was to create an xml config file to contain information about the component that didn't fit anywhere else (the only other places are an html and js file). With some discussion with design and implementation people, we boiled it down to Title (title of the window, tile, and tooltip), Description, Tile Image, and default size (what size would the component LIKE to be displayed at, may be ignored by the system). There is a section in the code where components are loaded manually into an array. This section was to be replace with PHP to parse the components directory and fill the array. An alternate solution was suggested: James writes a servlet that parses the directory and returns urls for each xml file. The JS is modified to take the urls, read the xml files and feed the info appropriately to the rest of the program. This will likely be put on JIRA for Andrew.

Workbench polish (get it? Polish?) - This was the majority of my time. There are several different layers of css, many of which are on components that are dynamically generated and a bit hard to get hold of. The welcome page is finished and dynamic. The top menu bar (actually more like a breadcrumb) is finished. There are really only 3 more major components to redesign. Not a crazy amount of work from here, the steepest part of the learning curve has been overcome.

Design - I spent quite a bit of time in discussion with Milena, Catherine, and Stan discussing design decisions and implementation consequences. Milena says this is extremely important (thanks Milena).

Alejandro

Google Charts
I started looking at the API for Google charts to make a java plugin, Amit took over.

Search Component
I worked with Andrew to translate the search component from a tool to an embedded part of the workbench.
The Search Component now is always present and it releases a Search event.
This event will need to be expanded to allow for an advanced search.

flare visualization
I have been looking at the flare visualization toolkit for flex. I am looking at the way that it can handle imported data. Eventually I will be bulding a tag visualization.

And it should go here: https://apps.lis.uiuc.edu/wiki/display/MONK/Hackfest+January+2008