Generalizing the File Uploader - Work Queue component

[Colin Clark]

Jonathan,

On 5-Jan-10, at 12:53 PM, Jonathan Hung wrote:

> In mocking up the interface, I realized it had many of the qualities  
> of a File Uploader:
> - a queue of items to be processed
> - a progress / status indication
> - add items to the queue
> - stop, cancel, delete work in a queue
>
> I'm wondering if it would be possible to use the Uploader to create  
> this interface for Decapod? I'm calling it a Work Queue pattern, but  
> maybe there's a better term.

The Uploader's progress and queuing features were specifically  
factored out into separate components, with the intention of ensuring  
that they're loosely coupled and reusable. I suspect there are a few  
lingering file-specific concepts in FileQueueView that would need to  
be refactored a bit in order to support job queues, but I think it  
should be fairly straightforward.

The real question, technically, is how we can receive progress  
information from the server side. Last I heard, Thomas was unable to  
provide any indication of the progress of a processing job. His  
suggestion was for us to calculate progress based on the average time  
to run for previous, similar jobs. Not something that I think is very  
kind to the user, since any number of variables may cause a job to be  
slower than the average.

This job queue UI suggests that we'll need a specific notion of  
queuing and scheduling on the server-side as well. It's not a feature  
currently supported in the CherryPy server Thomas built for us, but  
it's something we can certainly add. Not easy work, but it sounds  
pretty useful.

Thoughts?

Colin

---
Colin Clark
Technical Lead, Fluid Project
http://fluidproject.org