OpenIssues

ITEMS ON THIS PAGE WILL BE UPDATED AND MOVED TO THE ISSUE TRACKER

Description

To keep development going steady, but not forgetting issues that need to be addressed sooner or later a list of issues is maintained here. To give this a little bit of structure I've divided this in three categories.

Urgent

• Update wicket to version 1.3 (alpha/beta)
• New release
  • Remove AJAX link
  • Check if http://www.webical.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/HowToInstallWebical needs to be refactored
  • Create a release (webical-0.2.zip) with everything contained to make a successful deploy:
    • webical.war
    • HowToInstallWebical.txt
    • create/insert.sql snippets
    • context.xml snippet
  • and announce (where?) to get community interested.
• No external configuration file /settings wizard for the context information
  • Because of a configuration issue, there is no downloadable war that can be installed. The configuration file for webical to start the first time is packed into the war. Settings vary per user so the war will not work on all systems.
  • This can be solved by altering webical to look for a configuration file outside the war
  • Better still is the usage of a internal database for meta-information (databases/authentication sources). This does however mean that container based authentication is no longer an option. (perhaps we can do a combination with some sort of detection?)
• Cleanliness - The frontend code is a bit messed up. This is due to a couple of issues:
  • No clean separation in components - Haste has led to some shortcuts that leaves you with a sour taste in the back of your troth.
  • The use of a listener pattern is perhaps not the "wicket-way" of handling events between components up the hierarchy and has led to a nice mess of its own. The listeners are probably better of replaced by anonymous overridden callback methods. At least in some places. This would lead to a lot more clean constructors as well.
  • Some components, especially the views have grown to immense proportions and have become completely unmanageable. This is mostly due to the overuse of inner classes and the lack of central utility classes. This has already led to a lot of simple bugs that where impossible to track and led to some sleepless hours. The views are partly refactored in Increment V, but it would hurt to give this an extensive review.
  • There are a lot of places where javascript is embedded in the java code....

Less Urgent

• Review Plugin Framework
  • The plugin framework has been implemented a while ago, but is still to be used actively. Now that work is picking up on the juicy ajax parts it's time to perhaps rethink the frontend structure of the plugin framework. A couple considerations spring to mind:
    • There is no consistent way to handle models shared by components and perhaps their extensions
    • Updating components through an AjaxRequestTarget is not possible without tight-coupling between the extension and its parent (Through RequestTarget.get() instanceof AjaxRequestTarget)
    • The Frontend plugins are perhaps a bit to tightly coupled to their extension points already. But this might be just a matter of style.
  • Version information should be compared between webical and the plugin
  • The manifest must also include libraries (extension needed in the classloader)
  • The admin screen could list the plugins (with the status and perhaps error messages)

• Wicket/YUI integration
  • YUI resources are scattered throughout the resource files. This creates a terrible mess that is quite impossible to upgrade. This should either be sorted out and only those files be placed in svn that are actually used. Or we could setup a separate resource folder, say src/main/yui, to separate the files. Best would probably to combine the two.
  • We should explore the possibilities offered by the standard wicket-contrib-yui project. According to the messages on the mailinglist this has progressed a lot and perhaps we can join efforts with them.
  • The YUI libraries could use an upgrade.
  • The current implementation is not fully tested in all browsers. As we employ a lot of custom javascript it's likely that there are some compatibility issues.

• The Javascript detection facility still causes some issues with mobile browsers. It could be that this is fixed with a wicket upgrade, but otherwise other means of detecting the browsers capabilities should be explored.

• Use a central place for version information and update all references with maven
  • default sql files for example
  • web.xml

• Make the configuration screen more attractive
  • Wizard / tabs
  • The passwordfields in webical don't retain their data
  • ...

General wonderings / open discussion

• How do we feel about backbutton support in the ajax views? I see a couple of options (off course non-exhaustive)
  • YUI -Browser History Manager
  • Really Simple History

-- MattijsHoitink - 12 Sep 2007