Changing Roles

Hi,

Honestly, I'm a failure at GWT. It drives me insane. I don't know what it is--the poor design, the convoluted and broken API, or the lack of documentation so that I can work around it. Maybe I just haven't learned to love it yet, and I'm giving it undeserved flak. Maybe everything somehow makes sense. I don't know. But I can't stand it.

That's why, henceforth, I am distancing myself as much as possible from GWT as possible. I have changed my role in the group. I will be writing code to parse GWT objects into HTML. I can do this; it's more low-level and less tied to GWT's API than making the objects in the first place. I also have experience with HTML.

While Nialls works on the GUI, I'll be taking the canvas objects he creates and turning them into standard HTML. For now, the HTML will be dirty. Among other things, it will make use of tables for alignment.

The design challenges here will not be trivial. Data conversion is difficult to execute in a clean, crisp way. In addition, there's the meta challenge of getting the HTML itself to have a decent design, even if it is using tables. I honestly don't see what the big deal is, just so long as the HTML isn't poorly written.

Additionally, after the fiasco of last week's presentation, I have tasked myself with creating the group's presentations. Presentations will begin with one person (me) describing at a high level the group's accomplishments, the architecture, where we're going, what we've been working on, and any bureaucracies that need to be addressed. From there, the individual group members will give more in-depth discussions of what they are doing and how they are doing it. After this will come questions.

So, I will be doing GWT to HTML conversion and will be handling organizing the presentations. For next time, there will hopefully be a spike of minimal GWT to HTML parsing, and our next presentation.

Ian