This is very cool stuff. I liked how its just like Swing development so it was very easy to dive in and start hacking. The layouts are decent and scale nicely to your browser size. I think I spent half an hour playing with all the cool pop up windows, trees, tables, and menus in the Kitchen Sink example. Everything is very responsive and looks outstanding.
From an improved usability standpoint, the dialog popup window was something that caught my eye. It would be nice to have some charts or other information separated from the main page that you are currently browsing that could be created with a button-click. You could even click on a telemetry chart and have a popup with information regarding the point you are curious about. The tabbed browsing, trees, and menus might be nice to give the user some customization to their interface. It would be fairly easy (I think) to generate a listing of their 'favorite telemetry streams' and other fun things that would make their Hackystat browsing life simpler. We also could use tabs rather than drop down boxes when choosing an analysis type to change the 3-click selection to a 1-click action.
The one thing I wished they had was a stronger layout manager. I didn't see a layout manager that really customizable like GridBag or the FormLayout that I used with JGoodies. It might be that I didn't see it or because we are using HTML to display the widgets, but it would be nice to have a little more power.
A new coat of paint on Hackystat sounds fun. My lack of Jira issues says sign me up ;)
Cheers,
austen
On 5/27/06, (Cedric) Qin ZHANG
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I spent 10 min at this webtoolkit site, and it seems quite promising. In
fact, anything related to Google looks promising nowadays.
My first impression is (of course I might be wrong give the time I spent
on the site):
The programming model looks very similar to that of a desktop GUI
application such as Java Swing or Windows Forms. There is a root pane,
you add controls to it, and then code responding to control events.
Everything is in Java, no more html or jsp. A special compiler converts
java to _javascript_ (perhaps also spills out html).
The two things I feel minor discomfort are:
(1) It's still in beta
(2) It sends a request back to Google's servers to check to see if you
are using the most recent version of the product. It sounds like that
google has a secrete agenda and might one day use it to push ads to our
site if we decide to use the framework.
Before making any decisions, let's don't forget there is a "supposedly"
industrial standard for Java web application: JSF. The programming model
is more powerful than ASP.NET, but less developer-friendly.
http://developers.sun.com/prodtech/javatools/jscreator/reference/index.jsp
I am not backing any technology here, but I feel the Google approach is
more elegant and can potentially save developer time. If we really want
to change Hackystat look-and-feel, perhaps the more important thing is
to have a new interface mock-up.
Cheers,
Cedric
Philip Johnson wrote:
> Now here's an new toolkit that makes me think about taking a fresh look at the Hackystat user interface:
>
> <http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/>
>
> I'd be really interested to hear your thoughts on how GWT might provide improved usability for Hackystat.
>
> Cheers,
> Philip
>
