Hi all The Purple Assassins are working on the disclosure feature and a large part of that is the managing disclosure LEP (https://dev.launchpad.net/LEP/ManagingDisclosure). Because this work involves the development of a fairly complex new UI, Matthew and his team tasked us with delivering an interactive mockup of the some of the core pages to allow exploratory testing with users. The users acting as guinea pigs were given various tasks to complete and it was observed whether the features they were testing were easily discoverable, what usability issues came up, could workflow be simplified etc.
The interactive demo was meant to be a quick prototype. We did it using static HTML and Javascript (with YUI). It's deployed simply by checking out the branch to p.c.com (http://people.canonical.com/~ianb/disclosure/manage_disclosure_index.html). All the Launchpad YUI widgets are available for use, and interactivity is achieved using Javascript to manipulate the DOM. There's no templating or app server running etc. The data model is implemented in Javascript and using the UI "saves" changes as expected but everything resets when the page is refreshed. Despite fulfilling its purpose, there's some limitations we'd like to overcome. We see these sorts of demos being used more often moving forward so coming up with a preferred way of doing them will benefit us all. One of the biggest issues for us was the restriction to static HTML, and the lack of core technologies like tales that we use in production. It would be great to have a light weight app server / web framework available which would offer more of a chance to use these technologies and to hence produce prototype code more easily transformed to something suitable for use in production once the demo has served its purpose. Something like Grok (http://grok.zope.org/) may be suitable. We'd have a slightly more complicated deployment process than simply checking out a branch to p.c.com. It may involve deploying to an ec2 instance for example. So does anyone have any thoughts or input or past experience they'd like to share? My personal goals would be for: - lightweight - easily deployable - rapid development (duh!) - leverage as many technologies/frameworks/libraries as used in prod as possible - solution for some form of persistent data storage nice to have _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev Post to : launchpad-dev@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~launchpad-dev More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
