swat/desktop

[Deryck Hodge]

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Hi, Tridge.

| Very interesting stuff in swat/desktop, thanks! For those who haven't
| seen it, try a connection to localhost:901/desktop and have a play.
|
| Probably the most significant thing this would gain us is the ability
| to open multiple independent widgets at once. So for example, I
| currently have open two registry viewers at once, one looking at the
| local samba4 registry, and the other looking at a remote w2k3
| registry. Both appear on the same page.

This is the real advantage of this approach, I think -- that the user is
not limited to our view of how the interface should be laid out and which
"consoles" should be featured.  A sys admin could monitor smbd, manage
users, etc. all at once.

|
| When I discussed the possibility of a full desktop mode instead of a
| html-with-embedded-app mode with Andrew Bartlett at the cifs
| conference the main comment I got was that Andrew wouldn't like it as
| it prevented bookmarks to specific sections of the web interface
| working.

This is a disadvantage of a desktop approach, but there are work arounds.
Something along the lines of how Google maps provide a "Link to this page"
link, i.e. pass variables into the url to provide a bookmark of the
"Current Desktop View" or some similar approach.

|
| Anyone else have any comments on this? How important is it to keep
| SWAT 'web-like'? Or should we fully embrace the new age of 'desktop
| apps in a browser' ?

Yes, please... comments are welcome.  I did this more as an exercise of
what qooxdoo could do, and it was just fun.  I was doing multiple reg
editors as well.

|
| btw, sorry if you didn't mean for people to play with this
| yet. Obviously its just a work in progress (for example, the registry
| framesets need a window around them so they can be moved around). I
| just found it fun to play with and thought others might too :-)

Yeah, I was only saving to get to the work later, but I don't care.  Early
feedback is better probably.

One of the problems I'm having is that windows and inline widgets, etc.,
have to be attached to a larger QxWidget to allow movement around the
screen.  It makes more sense to me to allow movement around the entire
browser window, but I don't see a way to do this in qooxdoo.  But it
shouldn't be too hard to add the approrpiate listeners to the document
object, rather than just individual widgets as qooxdoo does.

|
| We should probably also prevent some code duplication by turning
| things like the registry editor into a little standalone widget, in a
| separate js file. I might have a go at that, just to see if I can
| understand how to do it.

Sounds good.

|
| Similarly, I'd really like to have a button for 'launch log viewer',
| so you don't need a separate window with a tail -f of smbd.log
| going. I guess that window should have a slider for the debug level.

Sure.  I'll be fleshing it out over the weekend, trying to get the
windowing framework in place, to make it easier to add viewers, editors, etc.

Cheers,
deryck
- --
Deryck Hodge                            http://www.devurandom.org/
Samba Team                              http://www.samba.org/
"This is the 21st century ... Magic isn't dead." --Marillion (2001)
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