My Lifelong Learning Lab - High-Level Design Document

Mon Aug 8 07:41:59 UTC 2016

Hi, Alan:

I've invited you to our next chat, let's start there.  We're focused on
*ouchDb at the moment, but the discussion will likely continue to cover
user management at some point.  If you can't make the time, don't worry, we
meet roughly once a week, and we'll include you in the "when should we
meet" chat next time.

Do let me know when you get around to writing the tests.  I have had good
success with the new gpii-webdriver bundle, it's ideal for testing keyboard
navigation between complex arrangements of view components, and I think it
could be a good fit at least for the functional testing of My3L.

Cheers,

Tony

On Thu, Aug 4, 2016 at 3:58 PM, Harnum, Alan <aharnum at ocadu.ca> wrote:

> Thanks Tony – yes, I see the issues you highlight with the installer
> (which I can fix in my fork of the CA dependency & will do as part of the
> refactor to start using gpii-handlebars). Whoops (this is one of several
> reasons that code is only in a personal repo right now…)
>
> Will definitely have a look at the other gpii projects you highlight
> below, and I'd like to join any discussion about *ouchDB that's currently
> going on. It would be great if we could align on things like user
> management where it makes sense to do so, especially since some of the My3L
> work is intended to be used in APCP. When are those meetings taking place?
>
> As a side note, my go-to on a UNIX-type system for serving static sites
> locally for testing / development / demos is python -m SimpleHTTPServer
> *portNumber* from the root directory – this works reliably on any
> UNIX-type environment that has Python installed, including Mac OS X, gets
> around the XMLHttpRequest issue, and all in all is a reasonable facsimile
> of what it's like serving the project from nginx or Apache without actually
> having to go through setting those up.
>
> Alan
>
> From: fluid-work <fluid-work-bounces at lists.idrc.ocad.ca> on behalf of
> Tony Atkins <tony at raisingthefloor.org>
> Date: Thursday, August 4, 2016 at 4:04 AM
> To: Fluid Work <fluid-work at fluidproject.org>
> Subject: Re: My Lifelong Learning Lab - High-Level Design Document
>
> Hi, Alan:
>
> I tried out your repo.  I wasn't able to successfully run *npm install*,
> as the chart authoring dependency fails to install.  I suspect it's because
> grunt and its plugins that are used in your post install step within that
> package are dev depencies and not plain old dependencies.  Thus, they are
> not available for the postinstall step within the chart authoring
> dependency itself.  You might not see this if you have the required
> packages installed globally, but it fails at least for me in OS X, and in
> my experience will also fail in CI environments.  It's worth addressing
> (for example, by moving the required dependencies to the main block).
>
> I also don't tend to have anything lying around to host content, and
> that's required to work around the file:// sandboxing of XMLHttpRequest
> calls in Chrome.  So that I could try out your work, I threw together a
> quick harness based on gpii-express that will host all your content:
>
> http://pastie.org/10929289
>
> If you save that to the root of your package and install gpii-express and
> infusion as dev dependencies, you'll have a standalone server for demo
> purposes.  As the current gpii-express code is not merged and published
> yet, you'll want to use a command like the following to install it:
>
> *npm install --save-dev
> git://github.com/the-t-in-rtf/gpii-express#2f224862730bca57fa1f036f24f26e1d43748419
> <http://github.com/the-t-in-rtf/gpii-express#2f224862730bca57fa1f036f24f26e1d43748419>*
>
> Once you register your module's content using *fluid.module.register,*
> the above can be made to use package-relative paths and moved somewhere
> more appropriate.  Of course, if your tests are better suited for testem,
> you could also use that to host your demo content by just adding a
> testem.json configuration file.
>
> With those bits of initial setup out of the way, I was able to try out
> your work.  I can see a few areas where at least some of us should get
> together, for example:
>
>
>    - user management: This is something I know Simon and Cindy are busy
>    with already, and I've done a lot with local user management.
>    - CouchDB and/or gpii-pouchdb:  Antranig, Cindy, Simon and I have been
>    talking through some of these issues each week, I suspect you might get
>    something out of those meetings.  It sounds like you'd also be interested
>    in more advanced topics than we've hit yet, for example, views, and full
>    text searching.
>    - Other tools to try:  We've already discussed gpii-binder and
>    gpii-handlebars, but we should talk through whether and of the following
>    might also  be of use:
>       - gpii-pouchdb: as a replacement for CouchDB in tests and demo
>       instances.
>       - gpii-pouchdb-lucene: provides test and demo integration of Lucene
>       and gpii-pouchdb.  If you need full text searching at all, it could be of
>       use.
>       - gpii-location-bar-relay: Allows you to bind particular variables
>       to the browser state and location bar.  I'm imaging you would use this with
>       your navigation controls, so that (for example) a user who navigates to
>       yesterday's timeline and hits "back" in their browser will come back to
>       today.
>       - gpii-webdriver: Real world browser testing, including full
>       keyboard navigation and browser state (i.e. hitting the back button)
>       testing.
>
> As I've mainly mentioned each of these in passing in various meetings, I'm
> happy to arrange a demo and Q & A session for any that are of interest to
> you or the wider group.
> Anyway, exciting stuff, keep in touch as you make progress, I'm excited to
> see how it goes.
>
> Cheers,
>
>
> Tony
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 8:17 PM, Harnum, Alan <aharnum at ocadu.ca> wrote:
>
>> I'd like to draw the attention of the Fluid community to a new document
>> on the wiki at https://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/My+Lifelong+
>> Learning+Lab+%3A+High-Level+Application+Design+Document
>>
>> This is a high-level philosophical/technical document intended to help
>> shape the development activities of the My Lifelong Learning Lab (My3L)
>> project, which has emerged as part of the work on Floe preference
>> exploration and self-assessment (https://wiki.fluidproject.
>> org/display/fluid/%28Floe%29+Preference+Exploration+and+Self-Assessment),
>> as well as starting to build self-assessment components for the APCP
>> metrics project. While we've sometimes referred to this work collectively
>> as a "dashboard" project, this has been largely because it's been the
>> closest shorthand for what we want to achieve, which I think is something
>> rather more expansive.
>>
>> At the moment the document represents my attempt to grapple with the
>> development side of the larger space being explored by those working on the
>> project (my existing development exploration along these lines can be found
>> in the repository at https://github.com/waharnum/
>> learningDashboard/tree/FLOE-455). I think it's quite a big, exciting
>> space to explore, and an opportunity to pursue some of our interests in
>> end-user computing in a targeted way.
>>
>> I'd very much like to hear the opinions of the community in general about
>> both the document's general philosophical direction and specific technical
>> recommendations.
>>
>> -Alan
>>
>> *ALAN HARNUM*
>> SENIOR INCLUSIVE DEVELOPER
>> INCLUSIVE DESIGN RESEARCH CENTRE, OCAD UNIVERSITY
>>
>> *E *aharnum at ocadu.ca <//aharnum at ocadu.ca>
>>
>> *OCAD UNIVERSITY*
>> 100 McCaul Street, Toronto, Canada, M5T 1W1
>> www.ocadu.ca <http://ocadu.ca/>
>>
>>
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>
>
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