Re: [4diac-dev] Reworking Deployment/Download

[Alois Zoitl <alois.zoitl@xxxxxx>]

In the work on improving deployment and monitoring for 4diac IDE 1.10
we made great progress. We now have:
  - combined the communication infrastructure of both. This allows that
now on each interaction with a device it is checked if monitoring is
active and it is automatically deactivated, and if possible
reactivated.
  - we can check which resources are currently instantiated in a
device. This allows:
      - to fully clean devices deleting also resources not modelled in
your device
      - to detect if a resource to be downloaded is already in the
device and delete it if requested
  - As experiment for allowing deployment also from the system
perspektive a new pop-up menu entry and a run-> deploy menu entry have
been added. These allow to deploy the currently selected elements.
These can be the System or the System Configuration for all devices, or
By selecting devices or resources individually in the system explorer
or the system configuration editor.

I hope this makes 4diac IDE better usable and triggers ideas for
further improvements in 4diac IDE.

Cheers,
Alois


On Sun, 2018-05-27 at 16:09 +0200, Alois Zoitl wrote:
> Apaprt from the handling the downloading the same config several
> times
> I think the overall download process with the deployment perspektive
> should be reconsidered. 
> 
> The main drawback of the current aproach is that one has to switch to
> another perspektive to perform the download process. This costs time,
> mouse meteres and quite some clicks. Furthermore it interupts the
> thinking process as it also requires a mental switch. Therefore I
> think
> the deployment perspektive as such should be removed and the
> deployment
>  integrated into the system development perspektive.
> 
> Before presenting some ideas that came to my mind about to do this I
> wanted to point out what are the good things of the deployment
> perspective that should be preserved in a new design:
>  a. It gives a very good and clear presentation what will be
> deployment
>  b. It remembers the selected resources and devices between
> deployment
> invokations
>  c. Response are clearly shown
> 
> Based on this analysis I came up with the following potential options
> for a new deployment UI:
> 
> 1. Add the Deployment Selection and the Deployment Console
>    This would be the quickest solution from an implementation
> perspektive and work also for 1.9.x (see attached screenshot). The
> small drawback is that it would require to switch away from the
> System
> Explorer to the Deployment Selection for the deployment
> 
> 1.a. This can be reduced by adding a deployment button to the toolbar
> (i.e, Run-Button). This has the slight drawback that one could press
> this button with a wrong deployment selection and not noticing it.
> 
> 
> 2. Add just a Deploy button to the toolbar and allow in a dropdown to
> select the elements to download. In a tooltip the current selection
> could be shown as well
> 
> 3. Add a deployment menu which is activated everytime something
> deployable is selected. This could be a system configuration, a
> device,
> a resource or several of these. This could be enbabled for the system
> explorer or the system configuration editor. I see this option very
> well suited for quick downloads during iterative development stages
> 
> 4. Utilize Eclipse's run infrastructure. Eclipse has a very high
> sophisticated infrastructure for running applications, which can be
> adapted to different needs. I had a first look but I was not sure if
> and how this could be adapted for 4diac. Currently it looks like very
> heavy weight compared to our needs. But maybe someone else has here
> better infos.
> 
> 
> So now I'm at the end of my ideas and I hope you are still with me
> after this long post. As you can see I'm not really happy with any of
> my ideas. Therefore I'm looking forward to your responses.
> 
> Cheers,
> Alois
> 
> 
> On Thu, 2018-04-26 at 10:38 +0200, Alois Zoitl wrote:
> > Now with the 1.9.0 release finished I think its time to look ahead
> > and
> > start pondering about what we would like to have in 1.10.
> > 
> > One part we haven’t spent to much work on in recent releases is the
> > download process and the deployment console. There I several issues
> > that should be fixed.  With this thread I would like to start the
> > discussion and planing for potential improvements here. 
> > 
> > One thing that I think would make 4diac much easier to use if we
> > would
> > better handle downloading the same resource several times (i.e.,
> > the
> > infamous “Invalid State”error). 
> > 
> > I was thinking that the on the beginning of a download the devices
> > should be queried on the currently running resources and if the
> > resource to deploy the user should be asked how to proceed. For
> > such
> > a
> > dialog I drafted a first mock up with different actions for such a
> > dialog. 
> > 
> > My questions on it are:
> >     • Is this the right approach?
> >     • Is there information missing in the dialog's text.
> >     • Is it clear that “overwrite” means that the currently running
> > resource will be deleted and the current config will be downloaded
> >     • Is a merge feasible, or would it lead to very complicated
> > even
> > dangerous situations?
> >     • Is a cancle and a cancle all needed or only one of both?
> > 
> > 
> > In addition to this I also heard from several users that the switch
> > to
> > the deployment console is very cumbersome and disturbs the
> > development
> > flow. Therefore getting rid of it and integrating it into the
> > system
> > perspective could also be a goal. Here I don’t have not really an
> > idea
> > how to do this.
> > 
> > Looking forward to your ideas and comments,
> > Alois
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