Third Client Meeting

Hi,

Well, the third client meeting has come and gone. Honestly, once again, I think it went pretty well. I think we've got the presentation format down fairly solidly: a brief summary of last week's accomplishments, and focus for future work in the coming time ahead, followed by a demo with specific questions deferred to those who know best.

As for me, the parser is functionally complete. It parses all GWT canvases into HTML flawlessly, as far as I can tell. The only drawback is that the generated HTML is horrible. I decided to forgo recursive descent parsing in favor of letting GWT do the heavy lifting. Ultimately, this should (maybe? I don't know, given GWT's robustness record) be more stable and resilient to improvements group members add that take advantage of more features of GWT. However, in classic GWT bloatedness, the HTML has only limited customization options--and nothing is able to resolve redundant and useless code (e.g. "<div></div>").

My solution? Write a regular expression meta parser/converter for the HTML parser's output! This should at least be interesting, and will have the benefit that we will have beautiful control over the generated HTML. In contrast to GWT, I will ensure that there is a clean API for this.

By next time, I hope to have at least a start on doing this.

Other notes on the meeting:
-User stories appear to be wanted.
-I speculated that perhaps we could serialize and deserialize Canvases to save them and restore them. This may not be possible, although I don't know why you can't just subclass Canvas and add "implements Serializable". Maybe some internal thing?

Ian