Well well. Just a simple idea. Develop a web application that connects to a server. The serve should populate a list on the left of available thingys which should be then dragged and dropped onto an mxgraph (or similar) diagram. These things can be connected in various way. Once done, the resulting diagram gets sent back to the server which does something with then, communicating a success or failure back to the web gui.
Sounds simple, eh!?
Well, yeah, maybe, if one did follow that last five years of web development hype. I didn’t (I’m writing boring bulk data extract and load scripts for a living). node.js might be worth a look. So install node.js. Once that’s done, you get the node package manager, npm. Now one needs a framework, so npm install <framework>. The framework needs to have other stuff installed correctly, so just use bower. Oh and something needs to be done with grunt. Done!
No. mxGraph should come with a bower package description, which it doesn’t, to be integrated into <framework>. After all, <framework> seems to be a bit low-level to be messed around with at the time being. So google for web gui applications with javascript. But be sure to restrict the search results to something published within the last year, otherwise you will end up with a gazillion of abandoned frameworks.
I don’t even have an idea yet how to partition my development into components which are manageable but I’m aleady lost.
Maybe I should just wait for the AI hipsters to make my server be a dog which I’m teaching tricks – hope the server doesn’t get too old before AI gets there, you know!?
