ALEG

What I've done

• I've spent all week working on the data maintenance suite, building the core infrastructure it uses and developing a specific set of screens to enter/edit an agent.

  This has gone quite well, although a bit slower than I'd have hoped. No technical roadblocks, just a myriad of details and extra bits and pieces such as making sure it is as easy to use as possible, amenable to mouse and keyboard navigation and fast.

  The basic framework is now there, a "help" framework has been developed (but help text has yet to be written...) and selection from lists, both simple (short lists such as "gender", long lists such as "ethnicity") and complex/hierarchical (such as places) are all working. Adding a new simple topic (eg, a new ethicity topic) is also working (great excitement at actually adding a new topic via the web interface).

  The code for adding a new topic to the hierarchy is nearly operational (I've just changed my mind about how to best do this, but I'll implement a better method on Monday).

  Main things to do include

  1. customised edit/entry of dates
  2. edit/entry of pseudoagents used by an agent
  3. edit/storage of a complex topic (such as the agent and all its attributes, identifiers and events (each of which has its on attributes and events, recursuvely...)

  A big issue which I've been wrestling with is exactly what features of the available client development environment (IE5.5) to use. I started the week trying to use only W3C "standard" features, but the temptation to use the Microsoft extensions is very great (and I succumbed) - it is hard to justify a worse (slower, more awkward, uglier) user experience on the grounds of "purity" when the Microsoft browser is in effect, the entire market. Tricker is whether to use the latest MSXSL Version 3 XML software. This has one very nice feature I'd love to use - multi-threaded server communications, which would be nice for performing multiple parallel retrieval of lookup data and enumerations from the server. But this software is not included in IE5.5, and expecting a client to have it installed is a very risky business, so I've decided against using it.

• Discussions and slight modifications to the prototype search results

• Document how ALEG will handle some tricky cases - The "Poets of the Month" works from the mid 1970's and "Down the Lake with Half a Chook". These are amongst the most "difficult" cases Tessa and Kathy can come up with, so if we think the proposed data model can handle these, we'll be happy!

• Continue on the data maintenance (input) suite - finalize the prototype agent maintenance screens.

• Continue discussions on user interface presentation options, sort orders, long -v- brief displays

• Switching from server mode programming (java/servlets/jdbc) to client mode programming (DHTML/javascript/DOM) has been fun! It is exciting to see the data maintenance user interface coming together, although the prospect of how many details need to be addressed is daunting. And then there is the data conversion to look forward to in a few weeks...