[CWB] CQPWeb Custom GUII

Pavel Vondřička Pavel.Vondricka at ff.cuni.cz
Thu May 9 13:26:01 CEST 2013


Hi,
I am just in the process of developing a completely new GUI on top of CWB. 
Actually it has ambitions to be able to use different back-end engines, not 
just CWB, and even at the same time. And it contains also a server application 
layer (Python) with a database and a (wanna-be-)general API (based on JSON, by 
the way) and a separate javascipt based (qooxdoo toolkit) GUI.

At the moment it can only queue asynchronous queries (both for monolingual and 
parallel corpora), show the concordances in tabs, sort the results if desired, 
and show some basic distribution charts. Nothing more. Next I want to 
implement at least some basic sub-corpora management (for fine-grained text 
selection, etc.).

We still have to discuss at the institute, whether this is exactly the way to 
take or not. But some kind of new GUI is definitely on the program - the 
question is only the exact design.

Best regards,
Pavel

> hi Stevie,
> 
> > Is this something that will change in new builds of the software?
> 
> No.
> 
> > If it isn't on the roadmap at the moment is it something you would
> > consider?
> No.
> 
> The rationale for the above is that given limited development time, and a
> huge TODO list of requested improvements/additional analysis functions (see
> the website), I will be focused on functionality and not on appearance. A
> full redesign of the HTML structure is therefore not on the cards.
> > Will there be any further development of the PHP, to make further use of
> > object-oriented code, for example?
> No.
> 
> (1) The PHP code certainly will *change* but only as a consequence of
> improving functionality, as per above. (2) I personally prefer
> function-oriented design to object-oriented for nearly all purposes (the
> interfaces to child processes are an exception). I am a C programmer at
> heart!
> 
> If you want to use a substantially different GUI (or GUIs), and/or to
> structure the software according to different design principles, then I
> would suggest that your best option is to write a separate piece of
> front-end software and use vanilla CQPweb as the back-end engine.
> 
> Currently, this is not very easy since the front-end needs to parse the HTML
> generated by CQPweb. However, among the many high-priority things on the
> TODO list is the creation of an API for programmatic access via HTTP to
> CQPweb that would allow clients in any language, on a server or in a
> browser, to access the system. Once this is in place you could write a
> front-end GUI around it to meet your precise requirements pretty easily.
> 
> (I'd also be interested to know - anyone feel free to chip in here - for
> this programmatic access, what data format is best these days? My instinct
> is for plain-text, but XML and JSON are also options).
> 
> best
> 
> Andrew.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: cwb-bounces at sslmit.unibo.it [mailto:cwb-bounces at sslmit.unibo.it] On
> Behalf Of Stephen Barrett Sent: 09 May 2013 11:22
> To: cwb at sslmit.unibo.it
> Subject: [CWB] CQPWeb Custom GUII
> 
> Hi,
> 
> We've been experimenting with CQPWeb for use with our corpora and find it a
> really powerful solution.
> 
> What we would like to do is customise the GUI quite heavily to provide for
> an interface for different user groups while at the same time allowing for
> any further upgrades to the code that might come along in the future. Given
> the code that we're running at the moment (3.0) we have a couple of
> questions:
> 
> The HTML output uses tables and ideally we would like to make extensive use
> of CSS, ideally with divs, etc. Is this something that will change in new
> builds of the software? If it isn't on the roadmap at the moment is it
> something you would consider?
> 
> Will there be any further development of the PHP, to make further use of
> object-oriented code, for example?
> 
> We are very happy to work on making the above changes but would like them to
> benefit the community at large where possible while also retaining
> compatibility with any further developments.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Stevie
> 
> 
> 
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