cloquewerk's thought bank - Autolog

The A-Team is embarking on a new initiative, and we need your help! After all, the A-Team's customers is Mozilla at large, and we like to keep our customers happy.

The project this time is Autolog. It's intended to be a generic tbpl-like results viewer for all the various projects that have test suites but aren't part of mozilla-central and the related branches.

We've already got a good start on the back-end: we're using an Elastic Search database to store results, and we're serving them up, and accepting new results, via a RESTful interface.

But now's the hard part: the UI! As we mentioned, the original concept was a tbpl-like interface, something clean and easy to scan. But tbpl is tied tightly to tinderbox, so it isn't easy to extend. We've spent some time starting at the code, and it looks like some extensive modifications would be in order, and they wouldn't necessarily make future extensions any easier.

Then we were told about an alternate to tbpl, asuth's ArbPL. This was designed to be extensible and has some neat features: it tells you what area has been changed (e.g. "Accessibility: Tests", "Layout: C++ Code"), it displays some details of failed tests automatically so you don't have to click on the failures first, and, for Mozmill, it has some very pretty stack traces and other information (example from the Thunderbird tree).

To be brutally honest, though, the A-Team is biased towards tbpl's look, both because it's the current standard and because it's cleaner. ArbPL has some very nice features, though, so it might be worth the effort to implement a tbpl-like interface, as time consuming as that might be.

But in the end, it's YOU, the customer, that is important to us. So let's hear it: do you like tbpl? What do you think of ArbPL? Is one much better than the other? Are there aspects you like of one and wish were in the other?

For the linkophobic, here are contemporaneous screenshots from tbpl and ArbPL (click to embiggen).



tbpl




ArbPL