GSoC09: Statistics module 4th weekly report: dashboard!

While midterm is approaching, this week has been very productive to start integrating Javascript and Python ends together and begin producing the Ajaxy dashboard for statistics module, pushing almost all ehancement that were planned. It also helped me a lot to introduce me better on the Python end, at least for basic tasks. Furthermore, I've continued helping with JS code review for survey module and helping fixing Melange bugs.

So, here the story: starting from Tuesday, I've set up my Windows partition to try to help with Organization home Google map bug, but at the end I was not successful as I couldn't reproduce the bug itself in my box :( I've then created the dashboard model, logic, view and template for the Statistics dashboard page. After helping with another code review for survey module, I've fixed (well, almost fixed, discussion is still ongoing) Melange issue 645.

After that, I worked on producing the skeleton for the Dashboard page, borrowing and taking inspiration from How to mimic iGoogle interface Nettuts tutorial (without widgets moving at first), so building bases to have the widgets created dinamically (in that way, we can retrieve settings for each chart from the Python end) and also added an OSX style stack menu (even if we will drop it out, as it's not so homogeneous with the rest of Melange application GUI).

To make the widgets inside the dashboard moving, I had to integrate sortable and draggable extensions of jQuery UI. But these were already been integrated by survey module, so I thought to merge with the main branch instead of doing something duplicate, and that introduced me on using kdiff3. At the end of the merge, and after some use of Javascript, I had the widgets finally moving on the dashboard!


On Friday, after another code review for Survey module Javascript side, I started a thread with Daniel Diniz (ajaksu) about Javascript style, and found it very very interesting and full of new ideas. That is the beauty of open source! :) Discussion need to be continued, but we came with some improvements of Javascript style guide wiki page.

The same day I worked on bug fixing dashboard, because it seemed not to work on Safari and IE. I've then found that I was passing to an anonymous function a variable called class, which turns to be a reserved keyword for both Safari and IE... renamed it to _class and all begun to work!

On Saturday I kept trying to work on Melange issue 645, finding also a good article about event capturing (which is somewhat the opposite of event delegation).

On Sunday, at the end, I've created model, logic and view skeleton for charts in Python (thanks Lennie ^__^), which will store and retrieve single chart instances for every user. I used then jQuery thickbox to display a "new chart" window, beginning to integrate Javascript code with Python to have a list of available statistics data (made available by Daniel Hans in a JSON object to be retrieved asynchronously) to be injected in a widget in the dashboard.

Things are going to be exciting next week, when we'll probably come with more interaction between Javascript and Python ends and see finally everything beginning to work!