User:Alsroot/trash/Frame Panels

Summary

One code base for all object browsing related functionality.

Owner

Name: Aleksey Lim
Email: send an email

Current status

Targeted release: 0.86
Last updated: Thu Jul 9 00:36:45 UTC 2009
Percentage of completion: 0%

Detailed Description

This code follows Design Team/Proposals/Journal mockups.

UI modes

Unified Browser supports plugins for different UI modes:

Journal objects-centric plugin
Books plugin, Calibre-like(or so) for browsing books
Audio plugin for browsing audio files
Video plugin for browsing video files
..

So, we could have plugins for different purposes i.e. Journal plugin could be very common/simple but something like plugin for Books/Video/etc can have some special UI features(that look redundant in Journal plugin).

For sugar-0.86+, Journal will load all installed plugins and provide possibility to switch between them, for <0.86 plugins will be formed in separated activities.

For sugar-0.86+, Journal plugin will be packaged with sugar, other plugins could be packaged into activities and have separate code base. In 0.86+ environment, these activities will use plugins engine from current sugar, for <0.86 environments(and for 0.86+ glucose releases when plugin uses newer engine), plugins engine will be packaged into activity bundles.

NOTE Separate activities is not a task for this feature proposal.

Plugins engine

Browser provides backwards compatible and versioned plugins engine API:

v0 engine for glucose-0.82/0.84
v1 engine for glucose-0.86(+)

Engine provides all necessary functionality for plugins:

TreeViewModel as a source of objects; so, all pulugins should use TreeViewModel for list widgets
- for local objects(rich client for <0.86 and thin client for >=0.86)
- for remote p2p objects
- for remote server objects
- aggregated sources(combine several sources)
UI widgets, like TreeView, TableView, tag clouds etc.
shell related procedures(like activate objects)

Benefit to Sugar

Browsing different types of sugar object looks the same in many cases(search, tagging etc.). So, keep unified code base and do not split it could be useful idea.

Scope

affects Journal code in sugar package
adds new activity for <0.86 releases
Datastore API should provide tags functionality for 0.86+

How To Test

In progress..

User Experience

All objects browsing features will look equally. It should mean that users will reuse theirs Journal experience in browsing books for example.

Dependencies

For >=0.86, all functionality will come from sugar package, for <0.86 it will be packaged in activity.

Contingency Plan

None necessary, revert to previous release behaviour.

Documentation

Design Team/Proposals/Journal

Release Notes