Brainstorming on the Baetle Plugin

["Sina K. Heshmati" <si...@khakbaz.com>]

The development of the Baetle plugin was suspended [1] and the priority was given to
the SKOS plugin. Now, I think that the community could already start to brainstorm
around the design and development of the plugin in question. 

Meanwhile, I'm discussing [2] with Henry Story to setup standard procedures to extract data from issue tracking systems (starting with JIRA), so that we'll be able to build our first samples of the plugin.

The idea is to have a customizable Bug Dashboard for each project using Forrest. The Bug Dashboard consists of an arbitrary number of widgets, each of them associated
with a specific search filter (content aggregation). What's more, Bug Widgets can communicate with the XML web server asynchronously (AJAX) to respond to user's requests for information. A simple and small, yet useful web-app, that is. 

Atlassian Software Systems may already have started/considered the development of an AJAX based user interface for JIRA but this, IMO wouldn't question the existence of such a plugin.

I'll be waiting for Forrest community members --my GSoC project mentor, Ross in particular-- to share their thoughts about the development of the Baetle plugin.

SinDoc

[1] http://marc.info/?l=forrest-dev&m=118120945026359&w=2#1
[2] http://groups.google.com/group/baetle/browse_frm/thread/9e16dcdcca66c195

Re: Brainstorming on the Baetle Plugin

[Ross Gardler <rg...@apache.org>]

On 16/07/07, Sina K. Heshmati <si...@khakbaz.com> wrote:
> The development of the Baetle plugin was suspended [1] and the priority was given to
> the SKOS plugin. Now, I think that the community could already start to brainstorm
> around the design and development of the plugin in question.
>
> Meanwhile, I'm discussing [2] with Henry Story to setup standard procedures to extract data from issue tracking systems (starting with JIRA), so that we'll be able to build our first samples of the plugin.
>
> The idea is to have a customizable Bug Dashboard for each project using Forrest. The Bug Dashboard consists of an arbitrary number of widgets, each of them associated
> with a specific search filter (content aggregation). What's more, Bug Widgets can communicate with the XML web server asynchronously (AJAX) to respond to user's requests for information. A simple and small, yet useful web-app, that is.

I'd focus on manipulating the Baetle docs rather than the extraction
of data from Jira. Create some sample docs to use in the plugin,
otherwise you are likely to find yourself waiting for the JIRA
integration which we should not be looking at in any detail within
Forrest.

I'd also caution against trying to create a fully functional "bug
dashboard". A projects chosen issue tracker should be doing that. What
I think would be useful for a Baetle plugin would be to have a bunch
of dispatcher contracts that allow us to embed select information
within another page. For example, suppose we had a critical security
issue in the webapp version of Forrest. We could drop a contract
indicating the current status of the bug fix onto our home page.
Another use case might be a "most popular" issues page in which we
display the top five issues with respect to votes and invite people to
visit the issue tracker to add their own votes to key issues.

Looking further forward it might be interesting to expose the Baetle
data as a JSON file. This will allow us to use tools such as Exhibit
to provide the "Bug Dashboard" you describe. As it happens, I recently
committed some code to the DOAP plugin that does this with our DOAP
catalogue data. This could almost certainly be leveraged in your work
if you want to give it a go.

I'm sure you have some use case ideas as well, you can bring in any
idea you like.

So, I'd suggest working along the following lines, don't feel
constrained by this though, feel free to jump into whatever interests
you, or to modify this with any other ideas that might come from the
communty:

- learn the dispatcher (probably by making your SKOS plugin dispatcher aware)
- create a basic Baetle plugin that can produce our "top 25 issues" page
- create a dispatcher contract that does our "top 25 issues" content
- extend the dispatcher contract to allow it to be customised (top 5
issues, displayed data etc.)
- samples, samples, samples
- produce JSON
- embed Exhibit

This sounds like a really cool plugin and is the one I was really
looking forward to seeing.

Ross