Feature Development Plan

This Wiki page describes features that should be implemented in EduWRENCH to improve user experience and/or software maintainability. The descriptions below are not 100% specified / clear, and design choices will have to be made (and entered in this page if relevant)

Short-term features

These are to be implemented over the course of a semester (e.g., as part of a capstone project). There are loosely sorted by increasing order of difficulty / amount of work.

Tab URLs

• We haven't been able to figure out (yet) how to include hyperlinks to tabs instead of to overall modules. This would be useful and improve user experience.
• This was not possible with older versions of Gatsby (as far as we know), but perhaps later versions can make this possible. To investigate! (Noting that upgrading to a later Gatsby may break our current implementation, which would then require more development)
• Last investigation failed (see Issue #111)

Module explorer

• It would be great for the site to include a visualization of the modules as a graph with dependency arrows, and tooltips that pop up when hovering, so that users get a sense of the whole content at a glance
• This would replace the "Modules" page (which for now just shows the same Module list as the EduWRENCH homepage)
• A likely good drawing library to use to do this would be Cytoscape.

Better display of simulation/questions

• Users have to scroll up/down in the same page between content, simulation, questions. Perhaps there is a better way to do this? (pop-ups? split screens?)

Logging in using CI logon in addition to Google Sign in

• Currently, the only way to log in to the site is by using a Google account
• It would be useful (and more professional) to also allow logging in using https://www.cilogon.org/
• This requires exploring the cilogon API and understanding how it could be integrated with the EduWRENCH source

Workflow Visualization

• Module D.1 shows images of a workflow. This is totally hard-coded for now, and a true visualization would be great.
• This is not necessarily critical for this pedagogic module, or for EduWRENCH, but would be broadly useful for all kinds of users. The idea is to have a JavaScript widget that takes in a .json workflow description file in the WfCommons format.
• This could be a very large project/effort, that should absolutely reuse existing JavaScript viz library/tools. For instance, Cytoscape could be a good candidate.

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Longer-term, more ambitious ideas that would require more time/people/funding more likely

• Suggested by Thomas Fahringer: Make it possible to "keep" the results from a previous simulation invocation, so that one can compare with new simulator invocation results (e.g., "side by side").

• Professor log in to customize content for a particular course