Task: Devel "wclient" branch: Things to do (and help with)

[Griatch]

The wclient branch deals with the webclient and web infrastructure update. It is described in detail here on the mailing list.

Fun / easy things to help with

• Go over the web/webclient/ HTML, JS and CSS files to make the default (simplistic) webclient more cross-browser compliant and following best practices. This could be multiple steps, but an experienced web developer should be able to help out a lot here.
  • Look over the JS/HTML/CSS files to see if they follow "best pracices" (whatever that may be). Especially when it comes to extendability and performance. Our goal is to offer a good, performant baseline for people to read and extend.
  • I kept the dependencies to jquery only and tried to not use JS things that are only available in the latest browsers. But I did this just by the seat of my pants - there are for example no compatibility exceptions anywhere or any real feeling for what the minimal browser version is. Our base client (especially the evennia.js library) should ideally offer as good backwards compatibility as possible (we can after all fall back to AJAX for browsers not supporting websockets).
  • After seeing what can be done about compatibility, we should be able to state just what the minimum browser versions are, we can't do this at the moment.
    The client, simple as it is, will currently not rescale well for different screen sizes and shapes - the inputline should stably stay at the bottom and the scrolling text always end up in the right area regardless of client or platform. I'm sure this is a CSS issue I'm not clear on.
  • The goal with future versions of the web client will be to allow for extending the GUI component with multiple windows people can send messages/data to (via added gui hooks). This is not critical for this first iteration of the client, but if anything could be done to ease future expansions already at this point, it should be kept in mind.
• At the protocol level, remap GMCP standard handshakes (Core.Hello and Core.Supports.Set) into Evennia inputfuncs.
• At the protocol level, remap MSDP standard commands (SEND, LIST etc) into Evennia inputfuncs.

Fun but tricky/involved things to help with

• Add/update server/inputfuncs.py with many more useful inputfuncs, especially for answering default GMCP/MSDP commands (like requesting all commands available, monitor an attribute etc).
• Update evennia/scripts/monitorhandler.py to remove all OOBHandler references, make it more useful as a resource for inputfuncs to use.

Maybe less fun things to help with

• SSH protocol converted to new Protocol Infrastructure
• SSL protocol converted to new Protocol Infrastructure
• IRC protocol checked and updated to work

[Griatch]

Fixed and tested SSL support in 4cd0278.

[Griatch]

Implemented updated MSDP/GMCP wrappers.

[Griatch]

That concludes seven out of the eight waypoints to finalizing the wclient branch.

[Griatch]

This issue is pretty much finalized, what remains is a catch for the reload/exit button of the browser, to make it a little harder to accidentally disconnect.

[Griatch]

Implemented the catch for exit/reload, meaning this is now ready to close against devel.