Week 8 report

This week I've done a good portion on finalizing the monitor, such as chart ordering and i10n. After that I've invested a considerable amount of time in replacing the big amounts of icon images in phpMyAdmin with CSS Sprites, since they improve page loading speed and allow for better style customization.

Since the Monitor is now not far from finished, I can start focusing on some type of Advisory/Suggestion System that can give the user hints for optimizing their configuration and server queries. I will need to put together a plan on how to infer those advisories and a proper visualization of them. For that I've already done some research of whether I can solve that with a business rule engine - as it would be just wonderful to have all these advisories/suggestions getting inferred from a set of well organized rules. To my disappointment there seems very little available for PHP. But I will keep looking.

What I made this week:

- Disable CPU and Memory graph for database server that are not local(-host)

- i10n

- Wrote a jQuery Plugin for convenient element reordering in tables, since I couldn't find any good solution for that: http://tyron.at/tmp/ts.html

This allows for easy reordering of charts now.

- Replaced chart size settings with amount of columns. The charts automatically size to the dimensions of the viewable area.

- The chart ordering is now saved as well. It will keep its order after a reload/restart of the browser.

- Improved usability of the returned log data table by adding a 'total sum' row at the bottom and adding a way of filtering the query texts. So now one can just type a table name and you get to see how many queries have been executed on that table (not pushed to my repo yet).

- I've spent a lot of time to add CSS Sprites to all of phpMyAdmin to replace the big amounts of single icon files currently being used. In a few tests I noticed a reduction of 20-30% of GET requests on a page load, resulting in the page being loaded faster. But it will also make it easier to customize themes and will make the pma code more readable.

What I will do next week:

- Still need to work on that settings import/export & IE compatibility

- Some feature that allows you get profiling information from the queries in the returned log data

- Check out what the possibilities are for displaying statistics or list over server queries that failed with an error and whether it would be of any use to read from the log files instead of the log table.

- Flesh out a concept for the Advisory/Suggestion system.