Category Archives: VISIBILITY

Phil 12.29.11

8:00 – 4:00 VISIBILITY

  • Working through the C3DL tutorials
  • Looking for a good tutorial on doing JavaScript with eclipse and not having the best of luck.
    • Neat, somewhat related tool: http://www.ixedit.com/
    • Eclipse is building a web-based IDE for JavaScript called Orion. We need to keep an eye on this.
  • Mike tried getting jebGl to work on site but only got a big scary core dump. After pondering, I’m thinking that a valid direction would be to have our charting running in Applets that handle J3D, and the user interface is all GWT. Applets and JavaScript can talk to each other, so the communication shouldn’t be a bif deal. It’s possible that we could put some declarative xml together that would allow GWT to feed a chart template to a general purpose applet, so we could have a high-lever interface defining the presentation and interaction. Next steps are:
    • A lightweight “Hello World” 3D Applet that we can attempt to deploy. We can use Applet rather than JApplet, since we won’t have any GUI overhead.
      • Probably going to use LWJGL, since it’s been good to me in the past.
    • A web page that has JavaScript talking to our applet

Kristi – 12.28.2011

Mike and I met with Tangie Hall today re: Visibility documentation for both the Project Assistant and Project Manager.

Tangie mentioned that she has been unable to use the Project Assistant as there was confusion about the splash page (i.e., the flashing buttons indicating that the page was down – avoided Tangie and her staff to use the page).  Suggestion was made to make the splash page appear more like a traditional logon/password page with a tutorial button.

Tangie is taking back a set of documentation for her to mark-up while she goes through the Project Assistant.

She also suggested that she would like a “print report” like option for both tools.

Overall the meeting was very productive – despite the inability for her team to use the tool to this date.  I am hopeful that we will work well together and accomplish much in the upcoming weeks.

Phil 12.28.2011

8:00 – 4:30 VISIBILITY

  • Watching the OReilly video OpenGL and 3D in HTML5. If you have an ACM membership, you can watch it from your Safari bookshelf. You do have your FGM-provided ACM membership, don’t you?
  • Looks like picking is going to be an issue, but we can do it old-school: http://www.khronos.org/message_boards/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=3336
    • If you use C3DL, picking is supported. Hmmm.
  • Learning WebGL cookbook
  • WebGL Cheat Sheet (API as of February 2010)
  • glMatrix (appears to be the fastest library?)
  • C3DL looks promising. It even explains why Mike’s firefox WebGL was turned off. Going to read this one tomorrow.
  • 11:00 meeting with Clif S. and his gang
    • Showed the various VISIBILITY apps. It looks like they should be useful
    • Discussed WebGL development option

Phil 12.27.11

8:00-4:00 VISIBILITY

  • It’s going to rain today and my new hardware aches. This “feeling the weather in the bines” thing might be real after all.
  • Working on a simple animated gwt app. I’m trying for this.
  • Having all kinds of problems with our server. Using vi on a 20 line file takes between 4 and 12 seconds to open. Tom is opening a ticket with Steadfast.net.
    • It appears that this is a problem with Steadfast. They are doing some hardware migration that is messing with us
  • I have the gwt app running in hosted mode, but I can’t get it running as a war file. I get an error saying that the app may need to be recompiled. Hmmm.
  • Did make contact with Clif – his folks are coming over Wednesday at 11:00. Didn’t get ahold of Tangie.

Phil 12.26.11

8:00 – 4:30 VISIBILITY

  • Happy Boxing Day!
  • Tried sending an email to Clif S. At all the various permutations of his name and none of them seem to be right. Hmmm.
  • fgmdev.com is still responding really slowly. http://www.fgmdev.com:8080 seems quick though, so the Tomcat server is running well, but lampp isn’t?
    • At 9:30, things are considerably faster.
    • At 9:31 things are slow again
    • Had to start up svn. What is going on with our server!!!?
  • Starting with the gwtgl documentation.
    • And while we’re at it, time for a new version of Eclipse (3.7.1 – Indigo). Trying a 64-bit version again… I also copied it to fgmdev/exchange/EclipseDistros if you don’t want to wait 17 minutes for the download
    • Tried the tutorial, which didn’t work (and from the comments, doesn’t work for many people). Checked out the code from https://gwtgl.googlecode.com/svn/. That kindof works…
      • Only check out GwrGl and GwtGl-techDemos. GwtGL-examples doesn’t seem to have anything in it, and competes for the same namespace as techDemos (which checks out as “examples”)
  • New version of GWT In Action is available on fgmdev/exchange/Books

Phil 12.23.11

9:00 – 4:00

  • Prepping for interview. It went well. They want to visualize lots of data.
  • In thinking about the above, I’ve started to worry about the graphing capability within GWT, which is not really even as good as Flex. I’m starting to think that we could use GWT for what it’s good at – text fields, comboboxes and such, while developing standalone charts in WebGL (3D). The reason for this is that once we’re in the 3D realm, drawing cool things actually becomes easier. Shiny is done with reflection mapping as opposed to layuers of vector art. Hardware accelerated 3d is capable of showing tens of thousands of points in a frame – orders of magnitude more than 2D systems
  • I asked Mike to try putting a gwtgl app inside jebgl to see if its possible

Phil 12.22.11

9:30 – VISIBILITY

  • The days are getting longer!
  • Downloaded SmartGWT. I talked to Dong about the risks of mixing them, as well as the advantages/disadvantages of each. He thinks that GWT is easier to work with.

Dong Shin 12.21.2011

  • developing PPM with GWT
    • spent past few days creating UI mimicking PPM
    • mixing GWT with SmartGWT is not very good… Some dynamic object creation throws exceptions that are hard to find where it came from.
    • getting list of projects from database
    • displaying list of projects in SmartGWT
      • special parsing required to use their ListGridRecord

Phil 12.21.11

9:30 – 2:30 VISIBILITY

  • Hmm. Can’t seem to edit an entry when using IE. Odd. May poke at this later…
  • Heading over to the fort for the first time since I broke my leg. Hopefully my glasses are still there
    • Talked to Tangie. We’re going to try to find some number (10-ish) of non TST users that we can get to enter data before the end of the year. If that works, then we’ll try to get all the non TST folks by Jan 17th.
  • Went poking around looking for drawing capabilities in GWT. Canvas is supported by GWT and appears to be supported in all browsers starting with IE9

Phil 12.19.11

9:00 – 1:00 VISIBILITY

Mike 12.15.2011

  • Meeting with Tange this morning, went well.  Potentially more work for Dong
  • Finished the maven + gwt documentation, a Word doc and several sample applications are available in our svn at trunk/GWT_folder/samples/
    • The word doc in in the sample-maven-app project
    • At a minimum you will want to download the projects and copy / paste from their poms to set up your own projects
    • The Word documentation gives a step-by-step on how to build the projects from scracth

Dong Shin 12.15.2011

  • has been playing around with GWT and SmartGWT for past few days seeing what it offers….
    • creating UI mimicking PPM
  • met with Tange
    • she likes the new Project Assistant Data Navigator
    • talked about moving help to external HTML
    • TST projects are really confusing her
      • talked about setting relations between TST projects
      • Master TST can have up to 8 children TST projects
      • TST Projects have duration of 3 years
      • show relations in Project Editor (?)

Phil 12.14.11

9:00 – 12:00, 2:30 – 3:30 VISIBILITY

  • Spent about 30 minutes doing laps of the house without crutches at around 7:00 this morning, then had to lay down for about an hour to let the leg recover. It wasn’t pretty, but much better than yesterday, when I could only stand that for a few minutes.
  • Now that I have GWT working, I’m going to go through the book (GWT in Action) unless someone has a better suggestion
  • Spent an unreasonably long time getting a request for a doctor’s note that will allow me to charge hours while on disability
  • Tom brought up the laptop. I have two screens! Woot.

Phil 12.13.11

8:00 – 12:00, 4:00 – 5:00VISIBILITY

  • Setting up a developer account with admin privileges on my home machine since I can’t launch the GWT server otherwise. Yay! Everything is working. Going to revisit the StockWatcher RPC tutorial to get back up to speed.
    • All working.
  • Asked Tom to bring up my laptop, since mine is broken. There’s also a DigiKey order here.