WimpyPoint

part of the ArsDigita Community System
by Philip Greenspun and Jon Salz

History

WimpyPoint was born as a standalone application, started by Philip Greenspun in late December, 1997 and later enhanced by Krish Menon. WimpyPoint was rewritten by Jon Salz and reborn as an ACS module in late 1999, as a term project for MIT's 6.916: Software Engineering of Innovative Web Services class.

For more general information, see the the user-level help pages.

Data Model

Styles

The standalone WimpyPoint provided only limited style support: it allowed users to select from a limited set of CSS style sheets to associate with each presentation. Users can now maintain their own repositories of styles. Each style is a row in the wp_styles table. Users can provide colors (stored in table columns in the form 192,192,255) and optionally background image.

A style can be marked public, meaning that every user can view it. (For instance, the "Default (Plain)" style is public.) The UI does not provide any mechanism for styles to be marked public (administrators should just use SQL*Plus to change public_p).

Note that the wp_styles and wp_style_images tables are interdependent, so if you wanted to drop either table you'd need to use the CASCADE CONSTRAINTS option to DROP TABLE.

The style mechanism has much more general applicability than just to WimpyPoint - it might be useful in the future to abstract this out somehow to provide cross-module style-editing support.

Versioning

The data model is complicated significantly by versioning support, which allows the owner of a presentation to freeze the slide set (and later view previous versions, or revert to them). Each presentation is associated with a nonempty set of "checkpoints," each a row in the wp_checkpoints table. Each slide is associated with the range of checkpoints [min_checkpoint, max_checkpoint) in wp_slides (a max_checkpoint of NULL corresponds to infinity, i.e., the latest version).

In general, when a slide is edited and hasn't been changed since the latest checkpoint, we make a new copy of the slide and fiddle with the (min|max)_checkpoint of the old and new slide; when a slide is deleted, we just set max_checkpoint to the current checkpoint (so it becomes invisible in the most recent "view"). See slide-edit-2 and slide-delete-2 for examples.

When a slide set is frozen, we preserve the sorted order of the slides in wp_historical_sort. Without this facility, in order to maintain the versioning abstraction, whenever a user reordered slides in a versioned presentation we'd have to recopy all the slides (defeating the incremental nature of our versioning implementation).

The wp_(previous|next)_slide functions determine the slide before/after a particular slide when viewing the slide set at a particular checkpoint (a v_checkpoint of NULL) corresponds to the latest version).

wp_set_checkpoint and wp_revert_to_checkpoint do pretty much what you'd think.

Access Control

Access control is handled using ACS groups. The wp_access function determines, given a user's ID (or NULL for an anonymous user and some fields from wp_presentations, what privileges the user has with respect to the presentation.

Tcl Definitions

This was a term project, so I (Jon) was eager to do something interesting from an engineering standpoint, and went maybe a little overboard with the abstractions involved. I don't think these are bad abstractions per se - they consolidate code which, while taking 6.916, I found myself writing over and over - but in retrospect maybe using abstraction so heavily is not The ACS Way(tm).
philg@mit.edu
jsalz@mit.edu