[Confab-developers] Confab Mods

[Jason I. H. <ja...@cs...>]

Hey all,

I've been hacking away this weekend, made decent progress.
Here are some changes:

- added sorting capabilities to queries (see bottom of
   this message)

- removed some methods from InfoSpaceAccess (basically the
   redundant ones). The API is more like a tuple space now,
   consisting of:
      - addDocument
      - removeDocument
      - getDocument
      - query
      - subscribe
      - unsubscribe

   If it's ok, I'd like to rename the methods, getting rid
   of the word "document". Let me know what you think.

- added in, on, and out operator functionality for InfoSpaces
   in-operators modify incoming data before the InfoSpace sees it
   out-operators modify outgoing data before it flows out
   on-operators run periodically (ex. garbage collection)

   The idea here is to make it simpler to add new orthogonal
   functionality. For example, some out-operators would be filter,
   blur, and add-privacy-tags.

   (There is a potential bug here since Liquid gets the tuples
   as they flow in, meaning that they can flow out without going
   thru the out-operators)

- added transaction IDs to data as it flows out
   (you'll notice that ContextTuples now have these IDs in them,
   which will be used for logging purposes too, to make it a little
   easier to understand what data flowed out)

- added simple UDP support for HTTPU notifications
   (This almost works, I'm going to take another whack at it to
   fix some architectural ugliness)

------

So here's an example request that you can make in URL form:

http://localhost:8080/infospace/jasonh?
    q=//ContextTuple[@datatype='location.room']
    &sortby=//ContextTuple/@timestamp-created
    &sortorder=descending
    &num=2

This says:
- Go to Jason's infospace
- Get all data with datatype='location.room'
- Sort by the timestamp created
- Sort descending
- Maximum tuples returned is 2

The parameters are specified in the mapParams variable
in InfoSpaceAccess. The constants used to define these
are defined in Confab.java.

-- 
Jason I. Hong                      |  Group for User Interface Research
ja...@cs...             | University of California, Berkeley
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jasonh |        http://guir.cs.berkeley.edu