Monk Workbench

This page provides general documention for the Monk Workbench. For more specific documentation, you should look at the code in SVN. There are also some other, older documents that are related (though often out of date).

1 Overview
2 File Structure
3 Components (tools)
4 Applications
5 Events
6 See Also

Overview

The Monk Workbench is a light-weight, client-side, web-based framework for building multiple applications that may share some of the same components (tools). The design favours the modularity and independence of the components, so that they can be assembled in various configurations (called features). This basic architecture will be familiar to users of the Eclipse IDE, which allows various views (tools) to be included and layed out according to the definition of different perspectives (applications).

Components (tools) are built to achieve a certain specific purpose, without much consideration of the particularities of the host application (in terms of appearance, GUI libraries, and behaviour). Developers can send a message to the component object that will be transmitted to the workbench and then dispatched to other components in the feature (application). In other words, components don't talk directly to other components, they dispatch and receive system-wide events. More information on components is available below.

File Structure

The Monk Workbench is composed of the following top-level directories:

apps
- contains the applications
lib
- contains shared external libraries
- current JS libraries include: Ext JS, JQuery, Raphael, Scriptaculous
  - as the Workflow Application relies heavily on Ext JS, a guide for it can be found here
- also contains workbench.js as a core library for workbenches of this (Monk) kind
tools
- contains the individual components/tools
- tools are grouped together in directories, by type:
  - analysis: tools that run SEASR analyses and analyze the collection
  - chunk: tools that display the text of chunks/works
  - collection: tools that display the collection of works
  - visualization: tools that use graphics to display the collection, or analysis results
  - workbench: tools that interact only with the workbench (mostly for debugging)
  - workset: tools that display and create worksets
- any web assets (images, styles, etc.) that are specific to a component should be located in the subdirectory of the component
- by convention, file names of components should be fully specified (not, for instance index.html, which facilitates developing multiple components at once
resources
- contains shared assets, like stylesheets, images, scripts, etc.
- shared workbench scripts (for core objects related to features, components, data, and events) are located in resources/js

Components (tools)

Component Creation Guide

Applications

The central application is the Workflow Application.

Events