N.B. This document has been superceded by the Monk Workbench Documentation

Overview

This document attempts to describe the "Summer of Code" for the Monk Workbench, an attempt to quickly build a first implementation. Just a reminder: Webclipse is meant as a generalized, open-ended web-based framework; our initial development will try to remain honest by not prematurely tying the framework to any tools that we've already developed. Unlike many projects, we have the huge benefit of a working application that we can use as a model - everyone working on this is strongly urged to download and experiment with http://www.eclipse.org/ if you don't use it already.

Phase 1: Preliminary Development (July 6th to July 27th)

The first phase of the work will involve creating the basic architecture for the Monk Workbench. The focus during this phase will be to familiarize ourselves with the relevant technologies and to develop preliminary components. in particular, the work will be divided into two parts:

• interface components (University of Alberta)
• management components (McMaster University)

Interface components (University of Alberta)

A good candidate for implementing the interface components is EXTJS. Note that we're not interested in the wide range of widgets available from EXTJS or YUI for now (widgets that might be used within certain views), we're just looking at the general window and layout manager for views.

compound "view" widgets (July 6th to July 13th)

The main part of the view widget is actually a simple container for different HTML content (including HTML, Flash, Java applets, etc.). However, from there things get trickier because

1. views can share the same space as other views through a tabbing mechanism that has labels
2. views can define specific buttons available in the tab bar
3. views can define specific buttons in the main tool bar
4. views can define specific items in the file menu

For now it's probably best to focus on items 1 and 2 (we're not sure if the MW will have a main toolbar or file menu). For now we don't need to worry about where the view label and view contents are defined, that will be defined in the plugin specifications (so hard-coded values can be used for the time being).

Note that the tabbing mechanism may actually be more a part of the following item, the layout manager.

layout manager (July 14 to July 20th)

The layout manager is responsible for displaying several views and allowing views to be moved, resized, minimised and maximised. One of the trickier aspects of view management may be that views are usually resized as a group. For instance, if two views are visible in one column, then making one bigger will usually make another one smaller.

perpsectives (July 21st to July 27th)

Management components (McMaster University)

feature management (July 6th to July 13th)

event management (July 14 to July 20th)

object hierarchy and api (July 21st to July 27th)

Phase 2: Prototype Development (July 28th to August 20th)

image-view.png (image/png)
package-view.png (image/png)
one-view-column.png (image/png)
two-view-column-a.png (image/png)
two-view-column-b.png (image/png)
extjs-layout.png (image/png)