Week 1 report

As mentioned in my previous blog I spent the last days learning for a really difficult (and probably last) exam that I had yesterday (and gladly turned out well), so I had not so much time to work on pma.
What I did accomplish however is a bigger reorganization of the code, so that the single tabs of the status page can be refreshed via ajax. Also I fixed some bugs that I introduced with the changes I made in the week before as well as some fixes in other parts of pma. And finally I have fixed the reported bug 'Query Statistics add to well over 250% - ID: 3242060'.

Altogether I would say my project goal 'Restructure the page, add more interactivity to it' has been completed, and I have come up with a good idea for server status charting which is what I'm going to work on next week. Also I want to merge together some pages, which I already wanted to do last week, but lacked the time.

My initial idea of using a cronjob to record server status variables over time in order to chart them has the big disadvantage that additional setup is required which not every user can do as well as a low data density since cronjobs can not run more often than once every minute.

So I'm thinking to first implemented a windows task-manager-like charting that does an AJAX request every x seconds and thus slowly filling the chart. That allows for accurate real-time information which does not require any setup. For long term server status charting, a cronjob method could still be implemented as alternative.

Looking forward to build more cool stuff! :)

First day of work

So today is the first official working day for the google summer of code. Gladly I could finish quite some work already last week so I can spend some more time learning for my last exam on friday.

What I've done so far for the status page:
- Reorganized the layout and separated the statistics into tabs
- JavaScript filtering by name, category and alarm values.
- Query chart loads asynchronously to speed up page loading

I also added the JavaScript filtering by name to the variables page.

What I'm going to do this week:
- i18n for the added Texts
- some CSS fixes, that will also improve other parts of phpMyAdmin
- Putting together Charsets, Engines, Processes and Status page into one page
- From what time is left: Further research on a proper history recording for server load and query history.

Prepared to code

Since I have a fairly difficult exam (statistics & probability theory - how fitting ;), on may 27 I thought I start doing some coding a week earlier so I have enough time to learn in the evenings.

So tomorrow, I am going to restructure the status variables into one big table and then add filtering options that filter values with javascript. This can happen without AJAX, so it should turn out really fast.
I'm thinking of a simple textarea that filters the values as you type, as well as a checkbox to filter for bad values (the ones marked red) and a drop-down list for filtering by category.

Once that is done, I will start my work on some proper server status recording & charts.