1 Adam, Wolfram, Jakub and I just had a ninety-minute meeting to look at
2 MKWS (the MasterKey Widget Set) and discuss how to progress it.
4 I won't bother trying to summarise the discussion, just the
7 1. We really like the concept, though Jakub is wary about the danger
8 of reinventing the wheel.
10 2. We're happy with the distinction between two levels of MK2
11 integration: MKWS for entry-level HTML programmers; and more
12 sophisticated customers who want more control can roll their own
13 MasterKey Client based on MK2-UI-core.
15 3. To avoid that wheel-reinventing, we want MKWS to itself be built on
16 the UI core. To pick a concrete benefit: Wolfram has invested some
17 effort to make MKWS multi-lingual; but had it been based on the UI
18 core, he could have put that work into the core, and all other MK2
19 UIs would have benefitted from it.
21 4. We plan therefore to re-engineer MKWS to use the UI core -- or,
22 which might be a faster route to the same destination, to redo the
23 MKWS work but starting from a core-based UI instead of from
24 JSDemo. (This is in accordance with the experimental nature of the
25 work we've been doing -- what we're currenty referring to as "the"
26 MKWS code is actually one of several threads within the
27 "experiments" directory.)
29 5. Because we want to enable smooth demos at ALA this coming weekend,
30 we are NOT going to begin the re-engineering until after ALA,
31 instead concentrating on getting the current MKWS experiment to
32 work as cleanly as possible.
34 6. We want to establishing some demo sites that use MKWS, ready to be
35 shown to prospective customers. We think the best approach is to
36 pick three sites that currently have no searching (for example,
37 Dennis's site and one of my own) and add minimal MKWS code to
38 each. Then Seb will be able to demo the small HTML/JS changes in
41 7. To make these demos work, we will need to solve the problem of
42 cross-site scripting, allowing those sites to make Service Proxy
43 requests. This is the top programming priority (and what I will
44 start working on as soon as I've sent this message!)
46 8. After some back-and-forth, we decided that we would eliminate the
47 current use of jQuery. (We're not doing anything at all clever with
48 it -- basically just node-selection and HTML-building). Life is
49 simpler without the dependency, and the danger of colliding with a
50 different jQuery version in use on the customer's site.
52 9. We'd like to have mkws.js include pz2api.1.js on its own, so that
53 the customer's HTML only has to do a single JS include. Not a big
54 deal, but it just makes the demos look more lightweight.
56 10. We really like the explicitness of the configuration hash that
57 Wolfram's introduced, and the way it defaults intelligently when
58 elements of it are omitted (or indeed when the whole thing is
59 omitted). We'd like to add a config element that tells the results
60 page to pop up in front of the main website, like the Google CSE
61 results do on http://www.miketaylor.org.uk/