About Minibar

Some implementation details:

• It is implemented directly in JavaScipt. It does not use Google Web Toolkit or any big JavaScript libraries.
• It has been tested and found to work in the following browsers:
  • On the Mac: Firefox 3.5 & 3.6, Safari 4.0, Opera 10.10 and Google Chrome 4.0.249.49.
  • On Linux: Firefox 3.0.18 & 3.5, Opera 10.10.
  • On the Android Dev Phone: Android Mobile Safari 3.0.4 & 3.1.2 and Android Opera Mini 4.2.
  It does not seem work in Internet Explorer 7 (there are both styling and scripting issues).
• The implementation consist of two JavaScript files: minibar.js (186 lines) and support.js (147 lines). The latter is also used in a small web app based on the SALDO web services.
• To access the GF web service, it uses the JSONP method mentioned in the GF web services paper, which allows the web app to be hosted on a different server from the GF web service. (To demonstrate this, I put the Minibar demo on www.cs.chalmers.se, while the GF server that it calls is on www.grammaticalframework.org.)
• As an experiment, it does no use the grammars.xml file, but instead calls a little CGI script, grammars.cgi which lists the .pgf in the directory, in JSONP format. (Note: if you want to install this on your own computer,
  • if you click on the link, the CGI script will be downloaded as grammars.cgi.txt, but it should be called grammars.cgi and stored on the server in the same directory as the grammar files.
  • for CGI scripts to work with lighttpd, "mod_cgi" needs to be included in the definition of server.modules in the lighttpd.conf file.)
• [Added 2010-02-16] There is a button for generating random sentences.
• [Added 2010-02-23] All translations are shown, not just the first one, if there are multiple parses.
• [Added 2010-02-25] Next to each translation, there is now a little tree icon that you can click on to see a drawing of an abstract syntax tree or a parse tree. If you click on a drawing it collapses back into a tree icon.

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