[Officeshots] UI updates and features for backend developers

[Sander Marechal]

Hello everyone,

I just pushed out a big update to the central server that should make it
a whole lot more usable.

The UI is far enough along that you can sumbit requests and see the
results. That also means that I have dropped the kludgy never-expiring
dummy requests from the database.

Sumbitting requests
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You can submit new requests on the front page of
http://dev.openoffice.org. Select a file with the file input, check the
boxes of the office suites that you want to run (make sure you select
the applications appropriate for the document type you upload) and hit
Submit.

There is an extra feature for backend developers. If you are a backend
developer and you are logged in (with your password or through SSL
certificates) then there is a checkbox under the file input that says
"Only use my own factories to process this request". That does exactly
what it says on the tin. If you check that box then you do not have to
worry about someone else's factory processing your request. Only your
factory will get those jobs. Furthermore, these requests are always
given out first regardless of priority.

Viewing the requests status
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When you have sumbitted a request you will be taken to the request
detail view. It show some information about the file you uploaded plus a
nice giant icon. It also lists the expiry time. Only requests that have
not expired will be served to polling factories. The default expire time
for the development server is 4 hours. On the live site this will become
30 minutes. So, if you have submitted a request then you have 4 hours to
debug your factory backend before you need to submit a new request.

Below the uploaded file is a list of icons that represent all the jobs.
One job for ever application/OS combination that you checked on the
front page. When the job has not been processed yet then it will have a
big gears icon with a title of "Pending". These jobs are handed out to
polling factories (if the request itself has not expired yet). If a
factory has processed a job then the icon will change in that of a file
and a description of the result format.

For example:
http://dev.officeshots.org/requests/view/4995a969-793c-46b8-8ee6-6571c0a80105

That shows I uploaded a spreadsheet that I want processed by OOo Calc
2.4 on Linux and OfficeReader 1.0 on Symbian. The OOo job has been done
and returned as a PDF export. The OfficeReader job hasn't been processed.

You cannot yet see the details of the results or download them but that
is the very next thing I will be adding.

New timeout values
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There are three new timeout values in the system.

1) front page timeout

Only factories that have polled the central server recently will be
shown on the front page where you upload new requests. The development
server shows all applications that have polled in the last four hours.
The live server will only show applications that were active in the last
6 minutes. So, if you want your factory to be listed on the front page
so you can submit jobs to it then you will need to poll first.

2) job lock timeout

When you poll the server and get a job returned then that job will be
locked so that it is not send to other factories while you are
processing it. On the live server this lockout time will be 5 minutes.
If the job has not been processed by that time then it will be given to
someone else. On the development server this timeout is now 10 seconds
so that you do not have to wait 5 minutes every time you fix a bug in
your backend. It used to be 0 seconds on the development server but I
found that annoying to develop with. A recoverable crash in the backend
would cause the XMLRPC client to poll the same job over and over again
without any pause in between, so I set it to 10 seconds instead.

3) request timeout

As I explained at the beginning of this e-mail, requests also time out
after a while to prevent old work clogging up the system. On the live
server this will be 30 minutes. For ease of development this has been
set to 4 hours on the dev server.

Let me know if you experience any bugs or other problems.

Kind regards,

-- 
Sander Marechal