Re: [Xsltforms-support] updated demo WFS 'paging' page

[Stephen C. <Ste...@ut...>]

-----Original Message-----
From: C. M. Sperberg-McQueen [mailto:cm...@bl...] 
Sent: Monday, 17 January 2011 6:34 AM
To: Stephen Cameron
Cc: C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Subject: Re: [Xsltforms-support] updated demo WFS 'paging' page

[offline]

On Jan 13, 2011, at 12:20 AM, Stephen Cameron wrote:

> http://preview.emii.org.au/aatams/test/view_all_receiver_deployments_paged.xml
>  
> Hi All,
>  
> This is my demo 'paging table' now working with the data-island branch of XSLTForms (thanks Alain).
>  
> Also there is a Filter/Sort button added at the bottom taking you to a prototype filtering and sorting parameters interface. This has some bugs presently and does not actually filter or sort (as I'm looking for a cleaner way of building the filter model instance). Once this is working I will have a fully functional CRUD framework using Xforms and a Web Feature Service (WFS) for managing spatial data.
>  
> This is slow in IE but I don't actually show this version to IE users now, just a full set of data in a table with no paging.
>  
> It works fine in most other browsers, so....
>  
> The one thing lacking is something to indicate (e.g. spinning wheel) when a request is in progress getting the next set of pages from the server.

> Looks great in all the browsers I've tried (Opera, Firefox, Safari, Chrome),
though somewhat slow to load (I started this note to tell you Safari was
failing to display anything more than the headings, but in the meantime
the rest of the data has arrived).

This is running on a test server and will be a little quicker to generate the data on the server side once moved. Also, I have the strong notion that XSLTForms will continue to improve performance wise. 

Currently the server is limited to generating complex XML via 'composition' from a relational database, a new version of the WFS server (see below) offers the possibility to avoid this, not quite an XML database but close.


> If I show this to students, I'd like to have some idea of what the page is 
about.

> So: one question about the information being shown.  If I'm understanding
things correctly (I should read the pages on the eMII and IMOS sites more 
carefully, obviously), the AATAMS program has a lot of (acoustic?) receivers
at fixed locations, which collect data from transmitters attached to marine
animals, allowing their movements to be tracked at some level of 
granularity.  And the page you point to is showing information on all
the currently deployed receivers.  Is that roughly correct?

Yes, but current and past deployed receivers, the data is not real time as the receivers must be recovered to download the data. The data visible (on a test system) is not up to date but one of the IMOS project aims are to make all data collected publicly available as soon as practical.

The idea behind using Xforms (and XSLTForms specifically) was to have a simple two tier client server system to manage the data. The server tier is the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) 'Web Feature Service' (WFS), a general-purpose spatial data web service standard. My main interest being schema generated forms with the idea that you can quickly create a web-interface for common 'scientific data' collection and access, mainly for so-called metadata purposes, which is where XML is most useful (somewhat inspired by XRX). WFS mainly builds on Geographic Markup Language (GML) for representing spatial properties of 'features', but this spatial aspect is optional.

The 'deegree' implementation of the WFS 1.0 standard is what I am using as it supports 'complex' features, that is features having subfeatures. Unfortunately the ability to update such subfeatures is not presently available, which has proved to be a significant limitation in the kind a use I am attempting to put it too. However, the WFS 2.0 standard addresses this problem and is close to being implemented in deegree WFS v3.0.

I intend to make the schema generated XForms XSLT templates available very soon, when the filter and sort interface is working. These are presently specific to WFS, but I'm very interested (at some stage) to make them general, or someone else might like to try.

> Oh, and one other question:  is it the Australian Animal 
Tagging and Monitoring System? or the Australian Acoustic 
Tagging and Monitoring System? or are they the same thing 
under two names?

Should be "Animal Tagging" there was a name change about a year ago, when the project broadened its scope.

> Nice work!

Thanks for your interest.

-- 
****************************************************************
* C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Black Mesa Technologies LLC
* http://www.blackmesatech.com 
* http://cmsmcq.com/mib                 
* http://balisage.net
****************************************************************