On 11/05/2011 10:27, Ross Gardler wrote:
On 11/05/2011 09:25, Steve Lee wrote:
One thought is that in order to ease evaluation by new users/devs a
global installer would be be useful, or at least clear signposting
between the projects.
Naturally. I'm proposing that Rave become the official reference
implementation of a UI for Wookie. Our site would reflect this
accordingly.
Wookie is focussed on providing a server based environment for the
hosting
of Widgets and Gadgets. It provides the necessary infrastructure for
clients
to request a widget/gadget instance (or a wgt package if
appropriate). It
also provides a persistence layer so that widgets/gadgets can store
preference values. Wookie does not concern itself with the rendering of
those widgets/gadgets.
I may be getting confused but doesn't Wookie also implement Wave APIs
- do these really belong there as well? But that's another
discussion....
I'm not sure where "there" is. I don't think it is important for this
proposal which is only concerned with UI. However, for completeness, I
believe the Wave integration we currently have belongs here. In the
long term we should consider adopting Apache Wave for this rather than
the partial local implementation we currently have. However, there is
currently no use case so lets stay focussed (for reference Rave has
Wave features on its long term objectives list so a relationship with
the Rave community now would be a good thing in the future too).
Proposal
========
Wookie should deprecate all UI code and provide integration with Rave,
thereby allowing Rave to host W3C Widgets as well as OpenSocial
gadgets. Our
UI will no longer be interactive. All administration activities will be
carried out via a command line application, interfacing with Wookie
via the
REST API.
Util now Wookie has required simple UI to allow basic evaluation
testing and developing. If these functions move to another project, I
would suggest that stand-alone unit tests would still be required at a
minimum, and perhaps a simple demo. It seems much of this could be
done with some mock widgets and the command line / REST access.
I'm saying *no* UI code. Wookie becomes a library. The moment we start
bringing UI code back in for any reason we start to blur the lines.
Testing is not a problem (in fact it is simplified) and instructions
for instantiating a widget and viewing it in browser would be just a
few lines long. In fact there is no reason why the CLI couldn't
optionally fire up a browser when a widget is instantiated.
e.g. wookie instantiate [WIDGET_ID] [PROPERTIES] --view
ok, I can see the logic in doing this now, but my only other question is
how we handle authentication to the admin facilities. (i.e at the
moment you have to "login" to the admin section to do certain things
using the web UI). Do we still keep the existing wookie authentication
for this?
I'm just wondering if there are any other "gotchas" we'll only find later.
We may choose to provide text based output from this API, although
I would suggest an XSL transformation of the XML responses from the API
would be most appropriate as this will allow data to be retrieved in
multiple formats (CSV, text, HTML etc.)
That sounds good. However without getting too sidetracked JSON does
provide easy consumption in many cases (but might not be appropriate
here). For the straight-street.com API [1] I ended up serving JSON
mime type with minimal formating to ease reading. using the Firefox
JSONView plug makes it pretty and then interacting and exploring is
really easy through the hyperlinks
Sure we can provide JSON too - we look forward to your patch or and
XSLT to convert XML to JSON, e.g.
wookie listWidgets [PROPERTIES] --transform=toJSON.xslt
or
wookie listWidgets [PROPERTIES] --output=JSON
We should offer all UI code in Wookie to Rave as a starting point
for their
"Gadget Store". I imagine that the majority of this code will be
re-written
by the Rave team to suit their local needs. However, I also imagine
that the
work they do will greatly enhance the work we have done here and,
for those
people who need a stand alone administration UI for Wookie we can
point them
towards Rave.
+1
Thanks for your comments.
Ross
1: http://straight-street.com/api/
-----
No virus found in this message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
Version: 10.0.1209 / Virus Database: 1500/3618 - Release Date: 05/05/11
