Notes from today's Engage tech meeting

[Colin Clark]

Hey all,

Here's a quick summary of our Fluid Engage technical planning meeting  
today...

The next month or two will be focused on using McCord's excellent  
artifact pages as a starting point for building mobile-friendly  
exhibit components using the Web. This will give us a chance to dig  
into some of the fuzzy architectural problems and get some clarity,  
experiment with real exhibit data, and actually create some viable  
user interfaces.

Goals:
   - Work with McCord's data and CMS to create mobile-friendly user  
interfaces for their artifacts
   - Use this to create generalized components and data feeds for  
exhibit objects
   - Build out infrastructure for flexible UI design using Infusion  
and open web standards
   - Settle on our remaining architectural decisions

Stuff to Do:

1. iPhone support for the Fluid Skinning System
  * Who's interested so far? Jacob & Heidi
  * Tasks:
    - Dive into existing CSS frameworks for the iPhone, including iUI  
and Magic
    - Familiarize ourselves with mobile WebKit techniques (markup,  
styles, animations, etc.)
    - Use Clayton's example as a starting point: http://spot.colorado.edu/~clayton/fluid%20stuff/mccordhackip.html
    - Build a new FSS or integrate an existing solution into FSS

2. Services layer: exhibit object data feed
   * Who's Interested? Michelle, David, Yura, with Antranig and Colin  
lending a hand
   * Tasks:
      - Get to know the data
      - Familiarize ourselves with existing Museum APIs
      - Write a preliminary service to import it (use JavaScript or  
Python with CouchDB until we have chosen our services layer tech)
      - Define a REST API for sharing exhibit data based on museum APIs

3. Architectural Decisions
  * Who's interested? Colin with help from Antranig and others
   - Choose a programming language for our server-side work
   - Select frameworks for services layer
   - Prepare a proposal for voting by the community

4. Mapping
  * Who's interested? James, Antranig, Alison
  * Tasks:
    - This one is probably more research-driven for now
    - What are others doing? Don't want to duplicate; things we can  
reuse?
    - Determine technologies: Canvas + Processing.js? File formats? SVG?

5. Infusion
   * Who's interested? Antranig, Alison, Justin, Laurel
   * Tasks:
     - New IoC container
     - Improved Pager API
     - More a11y improvements & testing
     - Custom build Builder

As always, if you don't see your name beside a particular task and  
you're interested in getting involved, let us know.

Colin

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Colin Clark
Technical Lead, Fluid Project
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto
http://fluidproject.org