By Splunk March 30, 2006
Full speed ahead for the next big round of improvements and fixes and we’re all going cheerfully bonkers. I was especially cheerful/bonkers today because I spent the morning prototyping some SVG stuff. In particular, since the splunk ui runs almost entirely on xml and client-side xslt, I was looking into how feasible/fast/stable it would be for our client-side XSL to just generate SVG directly, and for javascript to clone those svg nodes into a big complex DOM.
The answer is – omg it works well. Fast, seemingly stable, it can be pushed. Even in a big javascript front end like ours, the event handlers on svg elements pass right up into our existing framework. Some small tweaks had to be made to accomodate it, but no showstoppers. And it is rare for such a complicated thing to present so few obstacles in practice.
So thanks to Mozilla for being generally awesome, and particularly for turning on SVG in their release builds . Of course i have absolutely no idea if any svg will ever appear in the product … We do after all have a great deal of other more mundane improvements in the works. =)
Also, my apologies for not talking about skins. I had wanted to post a big treatise on skins, but since I’m rewriting and reworking all the css right now, it would be way too cruel; any skins you made would die with the upgrade to 1.3. So Im saving the post for another day.
Until then, for the indomitably curious, suffice it to say that the ‘invert’ link hidden in the footer actually cycles through the skin list, and the fact that there are currently only two skins shipping in the product does not prevent you the user from hacking the front end and making a third, fourth skin, etc…
if you’re feeling adventurous, put another skin file in [opt/splunk]/share/splunk/search/static/css/skins/, crack open photoshop and use all the existing skin graphics as a base to make your new skin from,
and as for how to hook up this new skin, for later 1.2 dot releases, look for the skinFileList in [opt/splunk]lib/python2.4/site-packages/splunk/search/SearchService.py
(for I think 1.2 and older builds, the list of skins was just the link tags in share/splunk/search/dynamic/main_ui.html