Forum .LRN Q&A: New package: Latest

Posted by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini on 07/20/06 05:39 AM

Hello All!

At Viaro Networks we are pleased to announce a new package for .LRN, called "latest":
It is a very simple application to check what's new (the latest information) within your .LRN site and the communities you belong to.
It is based on the simple browser-viewer concept: browsing in the left side (menu), and viewing in right side (view only the application), pretty much like your favorite mail reader.
Test it here:
http://www.viaro.net:8097/
login with: mailto:test@viaro.net / pass: test
and then press on the "latest stuff" button on the right side, then when you get into the "latest browser", notice that you can hide/show the left menu (the browser) and the .LRN portal template is hidden as well.

We have some further plans, but will be good if you can test it, all feedback is very welcomed.

Big Thanks to U. of Mannheim and Nima for allowing us to do this, and to all the people that with ideas and suggestions lead us to do it simple. Special thanks to Fernando from Tekne for collaborating in the design.
You can grab it (cvs co latest), and should use HEAD *master* templates files and new acs-subsite callbacks to make it work properly.

I'm pretty sure that many applications can benefit of this low-cognitive-friction browser-application-viewer concept, since is widely used on desktop applications.

2: Re: New package: Latest (response to 1)

Posted by Dave Bauer on 07/20/06 04:39 PM

I like this. I can think of some ways to improve it, #1, it takes alot of clicking to get anything done, not sure how to improve that, maybe have some sort of "summary" for each object.

One additional comment, I see how you just hard-coded the queries for each type of object, that's efficient and probably the best solution for a quick implementation.

Overall, I'd like to see this kind of thing built on top of search, since it provides a consistent interface for retreiving a list of objects.

Or even simpler! Forget all the specific queries, and just use acs_objects, since we have title, and can generate a URL or any object using /o/${object_id}. The only problem with this is restricting the display to "interesting" object types, since there are many internal helper types that you never want to display by themselves.

Anyway, it looks great!

3: Re: New package: Latest (response to 1)

Posted by Nima Mazloumi on 08/14/06 01:10 PM

Is the account still valid? Cannot login.
Cheers,
nima

4: Re: New package: Latest (response to 2)

Posted by Dave Bauer on 08/14/06 01:45 PM

Regarding builidng someting like this on search, until we can get search queries to be alot faster, its difficult to recommend it for a generic query builder, although the concept of having a full text search filter for any list of objects is compelling.

5: Re: New package: Latest (response to 1)

Posted by Dave Bauer on 08/14/06 11:41 PM

I found a trick frm the OpenFTS mailing list.

using dd < index_filename > /dev/null will cause the index to be added to the operating system file cache. This seems to speed up queries by a couple of orders of magnitude. Average time on OpenACS.org is .5 second for the actual search query.

I am not sure how often you'd have to do this, but it seems to be a good idea.

I'll post how I figured out which file the index is later.

6: Re: New package: Latest (response to 1)

Posted by Caroline Meeks on 08/15/06 02:52 AM

Hi Roc,

SG would like to expand this package in the following ways.

1. Create a lib file that lists all the "latest" items from a community in date order regardless of package (this is probably a new proc).
2. Add an optional user_id to return the lastest contributions from a specific user and create an includable UI that can be used to display them on the community-member page.

We should be doing this in the next week or so.

Thanks for your work!
Caroline

7: Re: New package: Latest (response to 6)

Posted by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini on 08/16/06 05:49 AM

Hi Caroline, both additions sounds pretty good!, though we need to figure out which is the most intuitive form to do each one of them, and avoid growing perceived complexity of this simple application. Looking forward to the mockups.

8: Re: New package: Latest (response to 2)

Posted by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini on 08/16/06 05:54 AM

/o/object_id is working with forums and fs, other object types has to be registered in order to work. A single-all-purpose query is difficult to achieve, specially since you have multiple values that define what has to be shown (like in assessment).

9: Re: New package: Latest (response to 8)

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 08/18/06 08:13 AM

Registering more /o/object_id should be something we should strive for the 5.3 release therefore for the bug stomp as well. After all, it should not be too hard to write the callback (will ask Nils to do this for invoices and project-manager, writing a documentation on how to do it).