7:30 – 4:30 SR

• Create data to chart!
• Reply to Chris’ email for recording twitter data – done
• Create chart db – done.
• Create statement table with rank and count. Save as insert into text, fix formatting in file before loading
• make sure that textures, lines, reflections and skybox works (WebGLModuleTest)
  • There were a few things missing and some issues with how lines get handled, but everything pretty much patched in correctly. Running code is here (for now…)
• Create new project with db access. Basically blinddb with WebGL div. Call it WebGlCharting1

8:00 – 6:30 SR

• The world is a sheet of ice. Working from home.
• Was able to update my directory, but the watcher in IntelliJ is based on save actions in the file you’re editing. This is horribly frustrating in that sometimes the whole project needs to compile based on dependencies. The answer for this appears to be Grunt, and it looks like the process is laid out here.
• Timesheets are working!
• Ok, everything below this line is a rant, basically. If you want to know what wound up working, read here.
• Installing Grunt, which has caused IntelliJ to completely freeze “Scanning files to index”. This is really pathetic.  Going to go scrape ice for a while and hope that my Xenon 3.3Ghz tower with 8 GB of ram can finish scanning some JavaScript Files. It may be a memory issue. From StackOverflow:
  

  I had the same problem with slowness in IntelliJ 13 after upgrading from 12. What worked for me was editing the idea64.vmoptions in the bin folder and setting the max heap to 8 GB (was 512 MB) and the Max PermGen to at least 1GB (was 300MB).Example below:
  -Xms128m
-Xmx8192m
-XX:MaxPermSize=1024m
Upon restart it was much faster.

  Then again, it may not be. I started to get error messages on the install that had hugely deep paths. A *lot* (30,000 files!) of stuff was getting installed. More than needed. Deleting it all and trying again from outside the IDE. If that doesn’t work, then I’m going to change the watcher so that it compiles all items explicitly.

  • Nope, disregard all of the above. The enormous install was because I had mistaken

  • npm install grunt-contrib-watch –save-dev

  • from

  • npm install grunt-contrib-watch –save -dev

  • when it should have been

    npm install grunt-contrib-watch -–save-dev

  • You know, this is because all of us developers are all looking for things that work and documenting it just when we get it running. No extensive tests that go along with books, just flaliing and commenting. Anyway, I got grunt to work, and have now run up against some weird typescript problem.
  • When you take each individual typescript file and compile it, as the IntelliJ watcher does, I get no errors. Here’s my code files:

    tsc --declaration --noImplicitAny --target ES5 --sourcemap classes/WebGlInterfaces.ts
    tsc --declaration --noImplicitAny --target ES5 --sourcemap classes/WebGlCanvasClasses.ts
    tsc --declaration --noImplicitAny --target ES5 --sourcemap classes/WebGlComponentClasses.ts
    tsc --declaration --noImplicitAny --target ES5 --sourcemap controllers/WGLA1_controller.ts
    tsc --declaration --noImplicitAny --target ES5 --sourcemap directives/WGLA2_directives.ts
    tsc --declaration --noImplicitAny --target ES5 --sourcemap modules/AppMain.ts

  • However, when I compile all on a single line (as Grunt does), I get the following errors:

    classes/WebGlCanvasClasses.d.ts(12,11): error TS2300: Duplicate identifier 'StyleElement'.
    classes/WebGlCanvasClasses.d.ts(29,11): error TS2300: Duplicate identifier 'CanvasBase'.
    .......... lots more errors................
    directives/WGLA2_directives.ts(67,12): error TS2341: Property 'linkFn' is private and only accessible within class 'ngWebgl'.
    directives/WGLA2_directives.ts(70,11): error TS2341: Property 'myDirective' is private and only accessible within class 'ngWebgl'.

  • Because like all modern code it seems, Grunt has a large set of plugins to do the same thing. In this case, we have grunt-typescript, and grunt-ts. Very similar. Only grunt-ts allows you to specify individual compile targets, which is what I need to avoid the compile errors listed above.
  • So to get all the pieces working together, first install grunt globally as per here. Once that’s done go to the root of your project directory and type the following:

    npm init
    npm install grunt -–save-dev
    npm install grunt-ts -–save-dev
    npm install grunt-contrib-watch -–save-dev

  • Once that’s done, you need to create a GruntFile.js. Here’s what works for me:

    module.exports = function (grunt) {
        grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-ts');
        grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-watch');
    
        grunt.initConfig({
            pkg: grunt.file.readJSON('package.json'),
    
            ts: {
                default: {
                    files:[
                        {src:['classes/WebGlInterfaces.ts'], dest: 'classes/WebGlInterfaces.js'},
                        {src:['classes/WebGlCanvasClasses.ts'], dest: 'classes/WebGlCanvasClasses.js'},
                        {src:['classes/WebGlComponentClasses.ts'], dest: 'classes/WebGlComponentClasses.js'},
                        {src:['controllers/WGLA1_controller.ts'], dest: 'controllers/WGLA1_controller.js'},
                        {src:['directives/WGLA2_directives.ts'], dest: 'directives/WGLA2_directives.js'},
                        {src:['modules/AppMain.ts'], dest: 'modules/AppMain.js'}
                    ]
                },
                options : {
                    fast : 'watch',
                    declaration: true,
                    noImplicitAny:true,
                    verbose:true,
                    target: 'es5',
                    sourcemap:true
                }
            },
            watch: {
                files: ['**/*.ts', '!**/*.d.ts'],
                tasks: ['ts']
            }
    
        });
    
        grunt.registerTask('default', ['watch']);
    
    }

     

   

• Once that’s done, type ‘grunt’ at the command line and you should get the following:

  >grunt
  Running "watch" task
  Waiting...

• At this point, a change in any of the ts files will cause all the ts files to compile to their respective .d.ts and .js files. This is better, but I still want dependency chaining. Still looking for that.

7:30 – 5:30 SR

• So far the only problem with the new FR app seems to be that people want to use old browser versions, so we’ll need to add a browser test and some kind of splash page.
• Tooltips? I wonder if I can use angular.element to make that work?
• Well I spent the whole morning chasing down bugs that turned out to be a bad merge. I think with TypeScript you may have to use the ‘force update’ option and prevent merging altogether. On the plus side, I managed to remove circular references for the CanvasBase and ComponentBase classes by creating a new file for WebGlInterfaces that has the interfaces for both modules. So now at the top of each of the Canvas and Component modules is

  /// <reference path="WebGlInterfaces.d.ts" />

  and that seems to solve that problem

• Tooltips are now working. Had to write a StyleElement class – it was easier than manipulating the style directly, and this way I was able to use the YUI calls that were in the old code:

  export class StyleElement {
      element:HTMLElement;
      x:number;
      y:number;
      hidden:string;
  
      constructor(e:HTMLElement){
          this.element = e;
          this.x = 0;
          this.y = 0;
          this.hidden = 'visible';
      }
      get(arg:string):any{
          var rval:any = this;
          return rval[arg];
      }
      getX():number{
          return this.x;
      }
      getY():number{
          return this.y;
      }
      setXY(args:number[]){
          this.x = args[0];
          this.y = args[1];
          this.toStyle();
      }
      setHTML(text:string){
          this.element.textContent = text;
      }
      show():void{
          this.hidden = 'visible';
          this.toStyle();
      }
      hide():void{
          this.hidden = 'hidden';
          this.toStyle();
  
      }
  
      isHidden():boolean{
          return (this.hidden === 'hidden');
      }
      toggleView():void{
          if(this.hidden === 'hidden'){
              this.hidden = 'visible';
          }else{
              this.hidden = 'hidden';
          }
          this.toStyle();
      }
      toStyle():void{
          var styleStr = 'left: '+this.x+'px; top:'+this.y+'px; visibility: '+this.hidden;
          this.element.setAttribute("style", styleStr);
          //console.log(this.element.getAttribute("style"));
      }
  }

• I am now kind of paranoid about subversion and am now making full backup copies, since I basically had to do that to restore the project after I realized what happened.
• And as I was testing against browsers, I found that tooltips didn’t work right on FF. That led me down a rabbit hole described in more detail in my blog.

7:30 – 3:30 SR, 3:30 – 4:30(?) All Hands

• Snow. Working from home.
  • Getting TypeScript to work
  • Installing NodeJS
  • Installed node and “File Watchers” plugins
  • Settings->Languages and Frameworks->Node.js and NPM->Node interpreter: C:\Program Files\nodejs\node.exe.
  • Typescript now works, but I need to download definitelyTyped, for which I need Git – Installed.
  • Had to fix the THREE.Mesh d.ts to have the Material be MeshBasicMaterial, which is the default.
  • Compiled all the TypeScript files without errors or warnings. THe code is once more running. That only took 2 hours.
  • Shoveling snow break.
• Creating a new folder ‘classes’ and moving the TypeScript modules to (CanvasClasses and ComponentClasses) that.
• Going to try two ways of dealing with the canvas and data
  • Get a pointer to the WebGlCanvas passed to the controller, where WebGlComponent can be added and manipulated.
  • Done (a few times actually). I wound up passing the pointer to a callback function to the WebGlCanvas class that placed itself as the argument and then called the callback. That connects the loop in a nice, optional way. I then tried to have an addCube() method in the controller called, but controllers finish up after directives, I think. So now I’d like to have a way of having the controller call something when it’s ready. That would use the $scope.$on() code, but I’m using the controllerAs pattern , so no default scope. But thanks to this post, I found out how you get at it. Makes good sense too.
  • After looking and looking, I could not find a list of Angular creation events. Then I remembered from somewhere (need to find out where) that wrapping items that need to wait for completion can be done by using zero-length timeouts. Tried it out and it works:

private initCanvasCallback = (canvas:WebGlCanvasClasses.CanvasBase) => {
    var c:any = canvas;
    this.wglCanvas = canvas;
    this.myTimeoutService(this.addCube);
};

• I’ll need the timeout function anyway for behaviors calculated in the controller, so it makes sense to have that.
• And that’s a good day done. Tooltips next.