On Nov 5, 2009, at 7:44 AM, chi runhua wrote:
Hi all,
Long time ago there was a discussion[1] on whether we could re-org admin console to improve user experiences for 2.2, which was cancelled for some reason, since we are now in the begining of big change of Geronimo architecture, I think it's a good opportunity that we bring this up and also for the coming 3.0 release.
[1] http://old.nabble.com/-DISCUSS--Reorg-of-Admin-Console-for-2.2-td20628217s134.html
Here are couples of thoughts in my mind to improve the console:
1. re-constructure the navigation tree to make it collapsible, the tree level should be less than 3;
2. re-orginize the avaliable tree items into new groups, for this one I'd like to vote +1 for what Jack had proposed in the previous thread;
+ Servers
+ Application Server
- Geronimo Kernel (put Information, Java System Info, Thread Pool and Shutdown portlets in the same page here)
- Web Server
- JMS Server
- EJB Server
- DB server
- Repository
- New server assembly
+ Applications
- Deploy New (Suggest to merge in the plan creator, so that users can either choose to use an existing plan file, or create a new one using the wizard)
- User applications (merge WAR, EAR and Client, maybe bundles in the 3.0?)
- Server plugins
+ Resources
- DB pools
- JMS resources
- JEE Connectors
- Jar Aliases
+ Security
- Users and Groups
- Keystores
- Certificate Authority
- Security Realms
+ Monitoring and Troubleshotting
- Monitoring
- Logs
- Debug Views
3. re-construct the available portlets to improve embedded assistance information, for example, show breadcrum when user is working on a task; reduce in-line text on the current UI, and use hover-help or pop-up help page only when necessary etc...
4. for the long list on the current UI such as system modules, only show the most frequently used ones, use locate/find to display more....
Any comments?
These seem like basically good ideas to me. I don't have time, energy, or skill to do most of this work myself. If I were to propose some priorities for the admin console I would suggest getting it running under osgi on pluto 2 and finding some way to make the code simpler and easier to understand, perhaps by using a web programming framework such as jsf or wicket. A long time ago some web experts also suggested setting it up to use css in a more sophisticated way; this sounded like a great idea to me but I didn't understand any of the details.