Shuffl sprint 7 - progress review

The updated sprint plan is at http://code.google.com/p/shuffl/wiki/SprintPlan_7.

The high point of this sprint was the enthusiastic reception of the visualization interface, even though this has been completed at the expense of some of the other more curation-oriented features. If this truly helps us achieve better engagement for the ADMIRAL project, I judge this will have been a good trade-off, but some cautionary notes raised on the discussion group about maintaining the right project focus need to be borne in mind. The mechanisms for working directly with spreadsheet data went some way to reducing the pressure for some of the features not yet implemented. I have agreed with Chris Holland to install a copy of Shuffl on a system where he can use it directly with his own data, which will hopefully provide a powerful point of engagement for continuing work on ADMIRAL.

It may be worth noting that I don't feel the focus on visualization has been entirely at the expense of the original goals of Shuffl; i.e., to provide a lightweight tool for capturing and sharing annotations and data. Many of the fundamental capabilities have been demonstrated, but in different combinations: user-editable semi-structured data, card linking, and a flexible, pluggable framework for introducing new card structures. On the down side, some of the intended work on containers (e.g. stacks of cards) has not been addressed, and the card serialization format currently deployed is JSON and not RDF.

The testing framework has been extremely valuable. The full test suite now performs in excess of 2000 individual tests (though many of these are repetitious). Areas which have proved more challenging to debug have been exactly those parts of the user interaction code that are not covered by unit tests. I have resisted taking time to implement a UI test framework (e.g. based on Selenium), but rather have tried to move logic out of the user interaction code into unit-testable functions. This is a debatable strategy, but in the limited time available I didn't feel the benefits of deploying a full UI test suite would get me further forward. When I get time, I'd like to evaluate the Windmill framework (http://www.getwindmill.com/), as my past experience with Selenium has been somewhat mixed.

With work on Shuffl planned to continue as part of the ADMIRAL project, I feel my top priority is to implement as much as possible of the features desired by the actively engaged researcher - which is to improve the interface for saving and loading workspaces. Other than that, I need to continue the steps taken to promote sustainability of the outputs, including creation of a more approachable demonstration prototype. These two strands of effort would ideally come together in a back-end storage plugin that works with the Google Data API - if the opportunity presents, I'd rather like to do a mini-hackathon with someone who is familiar with the details of the Google Data API.