[Cosmo-dev] Dashboard Plumbing Stuff

[Bobby Rullo]

Hi all,

For the Dashboard functionality to work it has been determined that  
there has to be some amount of reworking of the "plumbing" side of  
things on the client side. In this context plumbing means stuff like  
the data model, client/server communication, and application level  
event handling.

The reasons that dashboard functionality needs this reworking include:

	* New types of items need to be handled in Cosmo UI
	* New views will be displaying items, sometimes concurrently with  
other views. Each view needs to know when updates have been made to  
an Item.

We could plug along and just add a new data type, and have the views  
update all the other views when data gets changed, but as the scope  
of Cosmo UI gets more ambitious some of the techniques we've been  
using in this area might not scale up in terms of developer time and  
maintainability.

Yes, it's all very vague right now, but Travis and I  are working on  
proposals right for supporting dashboard functionality which include:

	* support for stamping
	* application level events (using dojo Topics) for notifications on  
CUD (creates, updates and deletes) and other high level events (item  
selected, date range changed, etc.
	* Changes to the service layer to handle errors more consistently  
(and easily) and provide a more consistent facade to the server than  
you get when calling service methods directly.

The goal is not to over-engineer here - quite the opposite. We are  
trying to be as conservative as possible and only do what is  
necessary for preview and to be a lean mean JavaScript machine.

Stay tuned (this week hopefully) for some proposals in these areas.

Bobby