user interfaces for samba4 or samba3 configuration

[derrell at samba.org]

tridge at samba.org writes:

> I'd also be interested in any comments you may have on developing with
> Qooxdoo. I've been a bit disappointed at how little of the ui
> mechanics is handled by Qooxdoo. I was rather hoping it might take
> care of more of the details :)

A qooxdoo (it's supposed to be all lower case) application can and is intended
to handle the entire gui.  If allowed to, it will handle all of the details.
The paradigm is different than developing a traditional web application:
forget about style sheets, forget about html, pretend it's not a web
application but is a local gui application.  Writing complete, really nice
applications is made even easier with the 0.6 version of qooxdoo (which is
not, I think, what Sree has been using) but the 0.5.x versions also have
adequate capability for very nice applications.

One big problem with doing things "right" (and resolving many of your
described AJAX issues) is that ejs is too incomplete to implement JSON-RPC
properly.  With JSON-RPC implemented in samba4, it would be really easy to
make requests from the gui code to the core code in an asynchronous fashion,
and have a gui akin to modern local applications.  Unfortunately, ejs is
missing (according to their web site) such basic features as object and array
literals.  Without these, implementing JSON-RPC would require writing parsers
for the literals in javascript.

I have two potential exercises to play with at the CIFS conference.  If there
is interest from the samba4 team, I'd like to see if it's possible to allow
replacing ejs with SpiderMonkey (the javascript engine used in Firefox).  I
would hope to implement this in such a way that SpiderMonkey would be a
drop-in replacement for ejs, i.e. the ejs functions already being
auto-generated would be enhanced, if necessary, with context information
required by SpiderMonkey user-added functions, but left in place so that ejs
could still be used if desired.  (This makes the most sense, I think, at least
until it is decided that SpiderMonkey can easily entirely replace ejs.)  In
order to do this work, I will require some assistance with making the pidl (?) 
changes necessary to add SpiderMonkey context information to the generated
javascript-enhancement user functions.  Once SpiderMonkey is in place and
working, a much more elaborate gui could be developed much more easily.

If the samba4 team is not interested in having me toy with adding
SpiderMonkey, my other potential exercise for the conference is to begin
playing with a qooxdoo application for samba3, for configuration.  If I
understood correctly, there was a SOC project in samba3, adding a library for
configuration.  (Is this true?)  If so, then adding PHP bindings to that
library would allow qooxdoo's existing PHP JSON-RPC server to be used for
configuring samba3.

Please let me know if there's interest in either of these projects.

Cheers,

Derrell