Colin is very good at reformatting data - if you tell him the structure you want, I'm sure he can deliver.
I'm not worried about the time it takes to download lots of data, because the people with poor connections will be using data which is stored locally.
Parsing lots of data may be difficult, because we want to aim to make it usable on a multitude of devices, and a lot of PDAs/Phones look snazzy but are actually have fairly slow processors compared to 'real' computers.
So, if it is a choice between verbose downloads or client-side parsing, I'd opt for the former.
David IB
At 22:42 03/11/2009, Tyndale STEP Project wrote:
Firstly, apologies for the spam. For some reason, my SVN commit wasn't working too well!
Just to let you guys know that I've succesfully managed to get the simile Timeline widget to communicate back the onScroll event. I was wondering whether or not that was going to be easy, but it happened to be alright...
This means that we don't need to load up all the events of the timeline on page load, and depending on what the user is seeing, we can decide what events to put on the timeline (ie. if he's viewing a couple hundred years in Judges time, we don't need to send all the data for Jesus' life!)
One limitation with the Timeline widget seems to be that we will have to send back and forth XML (or JSON). Not a major limitation I guess, except that XML is verbose and takes time parsing if there's lots of it... Giving the number of events we will be showing is in the thousands rather than the millions I think that will be fine, but perhaps for the online version, if lots of people are asking for it at the same time, we will have to introduce some caching/a different way of interacting with the timeline module...
Oustanding on the timeline is:
1- loading the data into staging tables
2- converting the data into a neat db-friendly representation
3- writing a good data access layer
4- write an db to xml parser
5- tie the xml parsed data to the timeline
6- cleaning up timeline module to have it as a standalone module/view
and there's a bunch of other stuff to do for the articles, and all that...
Cheers
Chris
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Posted By Tyndale STEP Project to Tyndale STEP - Programming on 11/03/2009 02:42:00 PM
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