Date and time

Friday 3 October 2008, 9:00 - 12:30

Description

Employing the power of the world-wide web to foster online, collaborative, communities and to organise far-flung, information resources is a notion underpinning both eResearch, and the global ‘social networking’ movement. The research use of tools like ‘blogging’ or ‘wikis’ has grown phenomenally, successfully demonstrating the strength of this idea. We present here, as a half-day workshop, a next step in eResearch infrastructure, harnessing what has been called ‘Web 2.0’ technology for extremely rapid development of user interfaces to data, information, and knowledge resources.

This will be a hands-on workshop to explore and demonstrate building a working, production level user interface using the Web 2.0 Extjs framework. Participants will walk through what is needed to set up an easy to use web application interface for access to data resources via a Tomcat servlet container. Time permitting, they will then build their own specific purpose web application utilising the Extjs toolbox of interface ‘widgets’. Other, similar frameworks, their use, and how to best leverage web applications for eResearch may be discussed.

Who should attend

Anyone interested in Web 2.0 web application technologies for building easy to use, friendly, browser (client) based interfaces, and the supporting server-side components.

Outline

Topics will include:

• Workshop introduction will present background to building Web 2.0 webapps using AJAX, and the Extjs framework. 
• A ‘quick-start’ to programming in javascript, webapps, and the Document Object Model (DOM). 
•  Playing with Extjs, basic concepts, dynamic pages and developing webapps. 
• Debugging with Firebug. 
• Using the embedded Tomcat servlet container testbed. 
• An Extjs tutorial, building ‘hello world’. 
• Using the Extjs widgets, more advanced applications. 
• Building a ‘bare-bones’ portal application in fifteen minutes. 
• Discussion, where to go from here.

What to bring

Attendees:

• Must bring their own laptops (Windows/OSX/Linux), with Java 1.5 JDK installed. 
• Must also have an appropriate copy of FireFox (2.0+) with the appropriate FireBug JS debugger plugin v1.05+ (April 24, 2007 version) installed (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addons/versions/1843). 
• Should know the difference between Java, Javascript and have some experience or familiarity with Java (or Javascript), Object-oriented programming. 
• May have wireless internet capabilities for their laptop, but not required for most of, or the entirety of the workshop. 
• May bring donuts.

About the presenter

Steve Melnikoff is the deputy director for VeRSI and senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne. He is a collaborator with Ass./Prof. Gary Egan and Dr. Neil Killeen at Melbourne University's Centre for NeuroScience (in conjunction with the Florey Neuroscience Institutes) in developing informatics tools.

His past work includes developing Grid computing infrastructure, ‘struts’ based interfaces for high-energy physics data analysis, and one of the earliest GridSphere portal applications for astrophysics simulations.

Currently Steve Melnikoff and his colleagues are in the process of establishing a 'Research Data Capabilites Group' at Melbourne Uni to support Australian scientists with lead eResearch technologies.