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#11
The latency I'm talking about is this:

maemo.org webserver has to do several queries to the talk database. If I ping your server from maemo.org, I get about 150ms delay.

If I need to do 10 queries(Which is probably far too low) it takes at least 1.5 seconds to get the data. And I'm not counting work and datatransfers at that time. If you have parts in your script where you need data that is fetched in a previous query, this will increase more. And all this time no data is sent out to the user.

Whenever you run your database server and webserver at different locations, you really start to see this effect.

Another question is, how would you render the comments inside a maemo.org page?
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#12
I understand where you are coming from Niels, but several things can be done to optimize performance.

If you are are writing to Talk's database, the delay is almost not important since the routine (when adding news, blog entry, or app) is called the same time when the entry is saved to maemo.org's server. And as I have mentioned, you can even call a Talk page so I can create the thread on my side.

Now if you are concerned about multiple queries on Talk's database then don't run queries. Let me feed you data and render them asynchronously (ajax), just after the whole page is rendered. I see that you are running jQuery on maemo.org. It should work nicely.

With regards to your question of rendering comments, no, we shouldn't render the same comments in maemo.org from Talk. The only info you need to display is the number of comments (e.g. 25 comments.) from the corresponding thread at Talk. A link on the number of comments will redirect the user to the discussion in Talk.

Before we talk about how slow it will be, trying it out first might be worth a shot.
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#13
(I'm actually learning some things from this thread.)

Tim
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#14
Originally Posted by Reggie View Post
...
  • Create a 'threadid' column for article and app tables to store the newly created thread id in Talk
  • Comment count can all be queried directly from the database via the threadid
  • Thread creator can be a special forum user like 'NewsBot', 'AppBot', or 'BlogBot', to bypass SSO requirement
...
That's^ actually pretty slick...
 

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#15
Originally Posted by Reggie View Post
I understand where you are coming from Niels, but several things can be done to optimize performance.

If you are are writing to Talk's database, the delay is almost not important since the routine (when adding news, blog entry, or app) is called the same time when the entry is saved to maemo.org's server. And as I have mentioned, you can even call a Talk page so I can create the thread on my side.
Yes, this part should not be that big of a problem.

Originally Posted by Reggie View Post
Now if you are concerned about multiple queries on Talk's database then don't run queries. Let me feed you data and render them asynchronously (ajax), just after the whole page is rendered. I see that you are running jQuery on maemo.org. It should work nicely.
As I said before, ajax isn't possible between domains, because your browser doesn't allow that?

Originally Posted by Reggie View Post
With regards to your question of rendering comments, no, we shouldn't render the same comments in maemo.org from Talk. The only info you need to display is the number of comments (e.g. 25 comments.) from the corresponding thread at Talk. A link on the number of comments will redirect the user to the discussion in Talk.

Before we talk about how slow it will be, trying it out first might be worth a shot.
If we only provide a link to comments, we lose functionality. The whole idea in downloads, brainstorm and news is that we show the comments underneath the item. Adding a click through is not improving it?
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#16
Originally Posted by X-Fade View Post
As I said before, ajax isn't possible between domains, because your browser doesn't allow that?
I do this everytime, reading RSS, XML, JSON, or directly loading the contents of a page from other domains into a DIV. Here are all the examples for jQuery (see Ajax Requests section): http://docs.jquery.com/Ajax

Originally Posted by X-Fade View Post
If we only provide a link to comments, we lose functionality. The whole idea in downloads, brainstorm and news is that we show the comments underneath the item. Adding a click through is not improving it?
I think one of the goals here is to bring the discussion to one common place -- which is to Talk, well at least this is how I understood it from Quim: http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Comments2Talk.

If in any case, the comments need to be displayed, again it can be loaded asynchronously -- I can pass the whole comments set (by page, if needed) in XML/JSON.
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#17
It IS possible to have forum threads posted as comments on the site pages too, like I said before we do that on All About Symbian/N-Gage:

Here's a site page:

http://www.allaboutngage.com/news/it...ual_world_.php

Here's the forum thread for its comments:

http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/forum...849&styleid=23
 
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#18
Alright, now I'm understanding the possibilities and limitations much better. Thanks for the discussion.

Niels really thinks that the comments should be visible in the same page, otherwise is a loss of functionality. Mmmm alright, but only to cede on something so you cede on something else.

For instance, any problem if the comments are posted in tmo and only in tmo? (no interface for posting in e.g. Brainstorm).

Tradeoffs we could take:

- The comments are not fully synced in real-time. No problem if there are some minutes of lag. If someone wants to post she wil go to the thread in tmo and there will find out that there are more comments in the very last minutes. Not a big deal.

- Until we have SSO, users need to have accounts in maemo.org and tmo. Well, not a big deal either. Pure newcomers or lurkers will have enough rating a solution up/down in maemo.org. If you feel like commenting probably you want a tmo account anyway.

Are there more tradeoffs? I can't come up with any.
 
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#19
It's a laudable goal. Other possible problems with the solutions outlined:
  • Accesssibility for blind/partially-sighted users, or those with JavaScript turned off/unavailable, will suck.
  • Search engines won't cope well with the AJAX/iframe included content if it's done on the browser side.
  • Pages could appear somewhat "oddly", as the content gets loaded and then the comments underneath.
  • I most use the "quick reply" function - not having something similar on downloads/brainstorm/news would really hurt usability IMHO
  • Without account synchronisation/linking for a lot of people (let alone SSO), I worry about the usability of trying to transparently present two systems as one. Username differences and how flexible are the ITT/talk profile URLs in a maemo.org account? Lots of possiblity for user error.
  • How do we ensure that the context of the brainstorm/download/news page is presented when users just view through tmo? The Wordpress article copied the text - which seemed to work quite well for text-heavy stuff like blog posts; but what about downloads?

A use case:
User goes to download an application, downloads it, tests it and wants to rate it:
  1. They click on the fifth star, because it's such a cool app.
  2. They get prompted for their maemo.org profile login.
  3. Currently, they'd get to add a comment as well. Let's assume comment appending to a thread isn't done (far too hard without 100% account linkage)
  4. They want to add a comment after rating the app, so they click the Comment button and get taken to the New post form for the thread in question. But they get prompted for a talk.maemo.org username and password (or worse, an error screen saying they need to login)
  5. Once they get that right, they add a comment.
  6. They want to continue browsing the other downloads available.
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#20
Originally Posted by Jaffa View Post
[*]Accesssibility for blind/partially-sighted users, or those with JavaScript turned off/unavailable, will suck.
[*]Search engines won't cope well with the AJAX/iframe included content if it's done on the browser side.
[*]Pages could appear somewhat "oddly", as the content gets loaded and then the comments underneath.
I would be fine with a RSS-like system resulting in standard HTML pages.

[*]I most use the "quick reply" function - not having something similar on downloads/brainstorm/news would really hurt usability IMHO
[*]Without account synchronisation/linking for a lot of people (let alone SSO), I worry about the usability of trying to transparently present two systems as one. Username differences and how flexible are the ITT/talk profile URLs in a maemo.org account? Lots of possiblity for user error.
[*]How do we ensure that the context of the brainstorm/download/news page is presented when users just view through tmo? The Wordpress article copied the text - which seemed to work quite well for text-heavy stuff like blog posts; but what about downloads?
Ah, the tough questions. Maybe Niels and you are right after all...
 
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