I'm ve been trying to play around with the timeline widget and have managed to get all the events showing on them, on one band. Unfortunately the features offered by the API aren't so rich, so for example you can't dynamically add bands and remove bands. In our case it would mean that a lot of timelines would be blank when the time/scale is not appropriate. Filtering-wise it's probably possible, but again, it would be hack I believe, since the only attributes for an event are name,description, start and end time.
Also the GWT interface isn't so clean. It looks like someone wanted to use it, and so coded it up as part of his project, but it basically looks like a thin layer of java ontop of the simile javascript api. That kind of makes it hard, as a number of features in simile timeline I've had to add the interface by guesswork, and other bits are probably not going to be possible. I don't even seem to manage to add all the bands when driving them from the database. I believe that's because the timeline gets initialised by the GWT widget too early, and by the time by asynchronous requests to the database come back, it's too late.
So yes, we can add everything on one timeline. But on the other hand, we won't be able to seperate geographies, and other timelines very easily. It also ends up in quite a bit of spaguetti code. I'm kind of reluctant on continuing too far down this track.
I think the general design of the javascript simile timeline is pretty good, and so I don't think it would take too long to replicate the over-arching ideas. However, the actual generation of the timeline itself, with the syncing between bands, and "infinite" scrolling might be take a little longer, but again not impossible. Alternatively, we could leave as is for now on one band. And then work on that later. We'd still have to think about zooms, and setting the right descriptions to the events and so on though, work that would later have to be re-written.
Chris
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