Milestone 2: Course of Action
Mark and I will create a tool to create and/or edit IC Cards. The IC Cards will be stored as an XML database. When a new card is created, it will be appended to the end of the database. If the user attempts to create a card with the name of an existing card, the user will be asked to provide a new name, or cancel card addition. This is because IC Cards are uniquely identified by their "IC Card Names". When a user wishes to instead edit a card, a list of card names will be presented which can be edited. The user will then be presented with the same interface for adding cards, only the existing data will be provided for modification. After the user completes editing of the card, it's data within the XML database will be updated accordingly.
Since the database will already be in an XML format, it will be portable for the IC Card ' IC Structure Scripts. Additionally, this will be accessible to the MKEE team if they wish to generate an eclipse module that could modify the data or generate structures from the original IC Card Database. Lastly, the use of a standard XML Schema will allow several applications the ability to create, modify, or access the IC Card information regardless of platform or programming language. I plan to create a PHP script as the first implementation of the editor. Being a web-tool will be useful to the system since it could be extended by available web technologies. Starting in this format will ease the transformation to more complex applications that might implement this tool's capabilities since most other programming tools provide more widgets and interface capabilities than simple web forms do.
I will implement the visual editor for IC cards, making sure the output specification is compatible with later stages. The compatibility ensures traceability. The easiest way to provide traceability is to provide links or URL between the documents.