Fwd: Cypal Solutions

[Prakash G.R.]

Cypal Solutions

Revealing Cypal Lite screen shots ... Posted: 24 Jun 2008 02:18 PM CDT For those who are curious to know about Cypal Lite, the light weight Ajax console, here are some screen shots. When you login, this is the screen you would land at: One of the emails we have got asked, "Ajax application? So what is the fanciest widget you used?" The answer, as you might have seen in the screen shot above, is none. Just because its an Ajax application, doesn't mean that we should be adding fancy widgets and exoctic animations. While its all possible, we selected the other route - a simple, neat and elegant UI. Simplicity is given atmost importance, so is usability. So the home page would contain the quick links, that you would be using frequently. You would see shortcut buttons placed at appropriate locations. The screen real estate is properly designed for maximum use, at the same time not cluttering the UI. For instance, the navigation bar is shown by default and the Activity log is hidden by default. If you require, you can always see/hide both. The below screen shots depict this. BTW, if its not clear, Activity Log is the place where we log you edits, undos, redo, etc, so that you can refer what you have done so far. If you click an item in the navigation bar, a corresponding tab will be created in the UI. The advantage is that, if you want to move from the Servers tab to the Jdbc tab, its just a single click away. There is neither the overhead of fetching the details from the server nor the overhead of disposing the current UI elements and creating new UI elements. It just appears as soon as the mouse button is released when you click. It can't get any faster than this, that too in an web app Except for the Home tab, all the other tabs are closeable. So what is the content of a tab? The content is fairly dependent on what tab it is. But most of the tabs have one single table, like this: All the tables are sortable by *every* single column in them, and the user is free to select which columns to view and which to hide. You will have the Pagination controls at the bottom of the page, and in the text box you see there, you can say how many records you want to see in an single page. All the details of the table are configurable. Remember, all these operations (sorting, pagination, column selection) are done within the browser. This means no server process/network overhead. You can also see action buttons in the bottom of the table along with the navigation. These should serve as the context sensitive quick links. Now what is in the Action Bar? As you can see from the first screen shot above, all the controls are in disabled state. When you start performing operations like deploying an application, deleting a data source, changing the port of the server, etc, each of those operations will be wrapped into a command and executed on a command stack. The buttons will reflect the status of the command stack and enable themselves accordingly. Can you localte the annoying "Lock & Edit" button? No? Its because we don't have it. Our console is little intelligent that it locks automatically when you perform the first edit operation. It will be released whenever you press Save/Cancel. Simple? Now you must be wondering why the old console didn't provide it We will soon come up with the screenshots of the Wizard framework. Till then, post your comments/suggestions here or mail to cypal...@googlegroups.com

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