GSoC09: Statistics module final weekly update: Javascript fireworks and Code Swarm! :)

It's not a secret that I truly love Javascript language :)

So, as the last week of GSoC went by, I wanted to finish some of the work about Melange Javascript refactoring that I begun on May/June, just to give a real starting point and solid bases for a renewed Javascript layer for Melange.

So, first of all, I've learnt some advanced bash programming, thanks to the awesome Mendel's Cooper online book, "Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide" (PDF version). I found it very well written and really useful. Having learnt at least enough to deal with variables, loops, conditionals, exit statuses and functions, I've made a script to run shrinksafe over all our Javascript files during build and before deploying. In this way we can shrink our JS files to a half, and so it'll download faster once live.


Then, as we're using pylint to check proper style of Python files, I've made a bash script file to run JSLint over all our JS files, and also I've coded a big-mega patch to make all our JS files JSLint compliant! And here the final result..!


Furthermore, I've written JSDoc style comments in melange.js and melange.graph.js files, to let the community have an example on how to document JS files properly (it's very difficult to communicate semanthic of JS files to JSDoc Toolkit!). Running JSDoc Toolkit over those two files made documentation for private (developer) and public (only API) purposes. Following a sample excerpt of the final result.


Apart from that, I've also achieved this:


Seems not so exciting, huh? Well, what this alert box, behind the scenes, means is that Melange now has a facility to expose public JS API more or less like Google does (with Maps API and so on). Using this facility, I've made possible an up-to-date live embedding of statistics data to any web page, by inserting only a a script tag (and a div where the visualization needs to be shown).
There are two kind of exporting:

• LIVE: this connects the web page to a widget in the statistics dashboard. This means that if you change the visualization to a pie chart or the "virtual statistic" to another one, the visualization in your web page will be changed as well.
• FREEZED: this exports the current visualization in the widget, and it will never change.

So, more things can happen in the future with this new opportunity (manage a wiki of visualizations, for example), but also embedding statistics into document pages in Melange (this is very straightforward to achieve now). And, now, exposing JS APIs, we can think of many exciting new features (what about something to be embedded in the organizations' real home pages?). Along with JS refactoring and seed_db frontend these could be the next steps for my post-GSoC participation in Melange community.

During the beginning of this week I've also made two simple code swarm videos (coloured by programming language).
This one is for our main branch Melange repository:

And this one is for Melange statistics branch repository (which is merged with main repository).

Before ending the post, I would like to thank everyone involved in Melange community, my mentor Pawel Solyga, our project lead Lennard De Rijk, Sverre Rabbelier, my "in-place guide" James Crook (which I met several times here in Dublin, thank you again for everything!) the other GSoC students (Daniel Hans, with whom the statistics module has been possible, Madhusudan C.S. and James Alexander Levy), not forgetting the great Daniel Diniz.
And obviously Google for making GSoC possible, and Leslie Hawthorn and Ellen Ko for their hard work on it.

Also, last but not least, I would like to give a huge hug to OpenStreetMap community (and my former-year mentor Frederik Ramm), with which I've shared GSoC 2008, and with which I've had the opportunity to learn Javascript language in depth. Surely, as I've done during this year, I'm going to stick around and contribute to OSM community as well.