Thinking about debugging, visualising, authoring trees - next Wednesday's community meeting and FLUID-4884

[Antranig Basman]

I've started a JIRA http://issues.fluidproject.org/browse/FLUID-4884 to start pooling our thoughts about 
authoring and visualising, in preparation for next Wednesday's community meeting on this subject. This is by 
no means complete in terms of what we know about the subject so far, but contains a number of "seed points" 
for discussion, as well as a hopefully helpful "walkthrough" of what is required today when debugging the 
framework activities, in this case from today's investigation of Anastasia's event injection issue 
FLUID-4879. I think I remember some requests for guides like "how to debug the framework" and so this guide 
should prove useful in terms of suggesting the awful and arcane knowledge that is currently required as well 
as motivating the design of new systems which will let equivalent investigations be quick and painless.

As Clayton has observed, a very common widget that will be ubiquitous to all of these elements will be some 
kind of (relatively "schema-aware") browser and editor for general kinds of JSON material. This will appear 
presumably embedded many times in both the widgets I describe so far, the "timeline" widget and the "tree 
preview" widget. Various other things remain to be described - for example, idioms for dealing with 
extremely large pieces of configuration without become lost and disoriented, and for quickly keeping 
bearings around "fixed points" whilst expanding and collapsing elements whilst browsing around.

At various points, parallels are suggested between the UI affordances of this tool and today's UIOptions 
"floating panels" as well as the PCP desktop instances of these - I think these parallels are more than 
coincidental....

Please do add comments, questions and suggestions to this JIRA as well as to any areas in the wiki that you 
might create and link to, and we'll start talking and planning next Wednesday.

Cheers,
A