From: Wolfgang M. <wol...@ex...> - 2012-09-29 16:05:32
|
Hi Joe, the quick start looks a lot better and less threatening now, thanks a lot. > One question: Will the Dashboard be the new homepage? In other words, > will http://localhost:8080/exist take you to the Dashboard? If not, > is the current homepage going to be unchanged? The dashboard will be the new homepage for a local eXist-db installation. We'll remove everything from webapp/, except for a "not found" page to show as fallback if something goes wrong. > In fact, I'd love to hear more about the vision for this app. It's > clearly taking over certain admin jobs like user management, > collection browsing, shutdown, and app installation. Joern and Wolf - > care to comment? We (Joern, Tobias and me) started the dashboard as a launchpad for apps and a replacement for the package manager, and later added the notion of plugins. In addition to apps, which are self-contained applications providing their own web GUI, plugins are simple, single-screen dialogs which run inside the dashboard. The documentation, eXide or the demo are apps, while collection browser, shutdown, backup, package manager and user manager are plugins. The goal is to port the entire functionality of the old admin web page into plugins. The dashboard thus becomes the central launchpad and administration facility for the database, replacing the admin web app - and to some extent: the Java client. To install or remove apps you have to go to the package manager plugin. Clicking on one of the listed apps will either show you an install or uninstall icon. Uploading your own xar is possible through the upload icon in the toolbar. Right now the package manager also lists plugins, but they can in fact not be removed (only hidden), so this has to be fixed. Plugins are loaded and unloaded on demand via dojo's AMD loader. They are modular, self-contained units. To add a new plugin, you need to provide an HTML and a plugin.js file, which defines a subclass of the base plugin class. I will add a template plugin to help others understand how to set up a plugin. We also plan to add XForms support, which would make plugin authoring a lot easier, but this requires an update to betterform (though this will definitely be included in the final release). Cheers, Wolfgang |