[161] in Project_DB
please try an alternate interface to project-db version 1
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bruce R. Lewis)
Mon Jul 7 16:07:37 1997
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 1997 16:07:27 -0400
From: "Bruce R. Lewis" <brlewis@MIT.EDU>
To: project-db@MIT.EDU
As an excercise in using BRL, a UROP student and I rewrote the user
interface to project-db version 1. In the course of this exercise I
made some changes.
1. always use yyyy-mm-dd date format
2. project information page looks the same whether you can modify or not
3. creating a new project now has two phases: essential info, modify
The project-db implementation team would like you to try this user
interface and say how worthwhile you think it would be to install it on
the production server before we move on to project-db version 2.
https://ops-5.mit.edu/fcgi-bin/brl-fcgi/brlpdb/index.html
It's on the test server, not the production server, so feel free to
create all the informal projects you like and test the interface by
modifying them.
Let me explain more of my motivation for change 2. The project
information page in project-db can act as a sort of "home page" for a
project. But maintainers of that page can't see what it looks like to
others because a lot of inputs/buttons are in the way. One motivation
for change 2 was to help maintainers see what others see.
Another motivation for change 2 is cacheability. By sharing a cache
(see http://web.mit.edu/harvest/www/squidtest.html) users can get pages
much more quickly. Users cannot share a cache if a certain page looks
different for each user. Making the project info page look exactly the
same is an experiment to see if the user interface is acceptable; I
haven't actually made the page cacheable yet.
What everyone sees is "Authorized users may modify this project". Then
the modify page tells them if they are not allowed to modify.
Unauthorized users may play with the modify interface if they choose to
ignore the "you are NOT authorized" message, but hitting the modify
button should result in an "update failed" message. If you are NOT
authorized and you get any other message, please send me mail.
More technical details for the curious: BRL lets source code look so
much like a web page that it can be brought up in a web browser and look
like a mockup. PL/SQL has a procedure that prints out all the text
normally used at the top of an HTML page, thus using fewer lines of code
than if all the HTML was explicitly printed. I chose not to use such a
procedure in BRL so as not to sacrifice the browser-view capability.
Despite this handicap, the BRL source code was less than half the size
of the PL/SQL version.
--
Bruce R. Lewis <brlewis@MIT.EDU>
MIT Information Systems <URL:http://web.mit.edu/brlewis/www/>
