More on HTML & JavaScript Client Apps

In a recent post I wrote about the new log window for our Qt apps at work. Essentially, it delivers the log via AJAX to a web browser, with the html & javascript embedded in and served statically by the app. Works well enough.

However, there are two more ships on the horizon flying similar flags.

The first is my (secret) plan to build a debugger for a State Machine for a few years. Since Qt now has a state machine as of 4.6, and it seems both solid, well documented and behaves mostly correct (observing that we've yet to learn all ins and outs of a full state chart machine) is seems a good target for this. I've already written a QStateMachine to GraphViz translator, which outputs an SVG which can (with some good faith and heavy squinting) be interpreted as a UML state chart (cough cough).

Now, SVG is an XML document which has a DOM, which you can manipulate with Javascript in most modern browsers. Yay! However,  this did not, at the time of having the idea, include Google Chrome (my favorite), since SVG-DOM updates didn't redraw the image immediately.... They have fixed it since, but I am pretty busy with other things so this small show stopper held me up. I hit a bump, I move in another direction, especially when I'm just going somewhere to see where I end up. Will have to get back on this one ... :)

Anyway, for the final product, I think a nice event log and some dynamic colouring/resizes of states and transitions would work wonders for debugging the app. Breakpoints via mouse-click events in the graph is then the second step. Then there are some question marks, but the last step is, as always, profit. ;)

The problem is always to package it so that other people can re-use it. I have to try to get better at that, but it's sadly not on top of the priority pile when working at a startup.

Secondly, it seems as the BuildBot project is planning to boot my Jinja webstatus implementation that replaced the html-string-pasting in python. (I never blogged about that.. oh well.. fun times it was anyway) Anyways, sad as that can be, the new plan is for... a html/javascript-only client! The content can then be served statically (via twisted or your local "real" webserver, for more oomph) and the webpage then communicates with the buildmaster using relatively small AJAX requests.

I think the idea is pretty neat, and has much in common with the things above, so I might go ahead and tackle that as well. Or procastrinate until someone else does it and steal^h^h^hborrow ideas from that place. Anyways, the jinja-rewrite made it much easier to see the actual HTML, so the new javascript (preferrably using jQuery) client could build on top of the existing layout.

Small steps in the right direction makes the world a better place. :)

Also, some day in March, if things go as they should, the household will gain a new member. One very small and in need of almost-constant care. I estimate I will not be able to contribute to open source for a few years starting then. Best do what I can before that. ;)