What do you need in a Web-based UI?

[Jaidev]

Hi Everyone,

I am a Senior Product Manager on the LabVIEW Software team and I am exploring options for creating better Web-based UIs using our software platform. As an input into this process, I would like to understand how you see yourself integrating the Web into your applications today and in the future.

For context, 

How would you describe your application in a sentence or two? 

How do browser based UIs add value to your application? 

How do you create Web-based UIs today? (custom development or using a 3rd party tool)

Specifically w.r.t. the Web:

What elements do you absolutely need in your Web UIs? 

     - Visualizations like Charts, Graphs, Dials, Buttons etc?

     - Other elements like Menus, Login, scroll bars etc?

     - Are there new types of data visualizations that you have seen elsewhere and would like to use?

What would you want your UIs to look like?

     - Please attach screen shots or wireframes/mockups

Do you need your Data or WebUIs to be cloud hosted?

Are you considering any other visualization tools? 

     - Have you seen any interesting web visualization products that you want us to know about

If this topic is of active interest, please let me know in your response so I can include you in ongoing discussions.

Thanks for your help and continued support!

[Danielweng]

Hi Jaidev

this is really exciting for me that NI could have its own web development decision?

what our project is design monitoring system in the lab that include all the chart?number display element in the front panel but also include video monitoring?We want to share front panel on the website that our client could monitor and analyse the test result and we do not want client to install run time engine?

what we currently method is just share screen to remote client by team viewer?so if labview could automatically publish front panel to html file and then customer could choose use their own server to publish the converted html file to internet.or use NI provided cloud server to publish?that will be a very nice function for labview project?

thanks

daniel

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What do you need in a Web-based UI?

created by Jaidev<https://decibel.ni.com/content/people/Jaidev> in LabVIEW Web Development - View the full discussion<https://decibel.ni.com/content/message/139650#139650

[roodrood]

HI Jaidev,

Please include me in all related sicussions. we just made our first prototype for an IoT product and made a web app for it. plots and graphs are a must for us to allow the user to see a stream of data. also login and cloud features for saving files to the cloud and also online collaboration (like google docs). it would also be great for another project of ours to easily use the web app with a web server running on a compactRIO.

it would be great to see some of the modern UI controls and indicators used on modern websites. also, responsiveness of the page is very important for us (as problem that we have with curretn UIs developed with labVIEW for desktop). allignment and responsive would be great.

Thanks,

Farhad

[antarcticcat]

Hi Jaidev,

The application:
Multiple PXI chassis distributed across a WAN make user requested measurements on demand. measurement request/response is performed via REST web services. User interface will be via single website, hosted seperately from the PXI chassis (possibly in the cloud). Web interface will issue AJAX/Websocket requests to one or more PXI chassis for data, and present data to the user.

Challanges:

1) Having to 'Invent' labview-like controls and visualizations for the data. There are good open source libraries out there (https://ds3js.org) that could replicate many of the NI controls. It would be nice if someone created a library of 'canned' Labview-like controls using something like this. Charts and graphs are our main interest here.

2) The labview web server security options are fairly limited. we will actually need to use IIS/apache/etc. on the PXI chassis controller and reverse proxy the REST URL's in order to be able to meet our security requirements. (Labview web server will be available on PXI controller 'localhost' only, and only exposed to the outside world via IIS/apache/etc.).

There are many open-source frameworks out there that can handle many of the web-development issues. I think if there were just some LabVIEW oriented distributions of them, it could handle many of the issues related to making web-based user interfaces. some example frameworks to consider are the ds3js library above, as well as:

http://symfony.com

http://framework.zend.com

[Brett_J]

Hi Jaidev,

1. Our application is a a data visualisation application. We are taking large datasets from our customers and providing an interface for plotting and regressions. The results (a grading system) are then returned to the customer as a download for them to apply to their tools in the factory. This then helps with the real-time data analysis. It is a little different to the way I expect things are generally used where you are visualising data being collected at or near the acquisition system.

2. The browser based applications adds value for us by allowing customers to log into the web application and receive feedback to improve their processes

3. We are still looking into creating the web applications locally but have been looking into websockets and js.

The elements that we would like in the WEBUI are graphs, tables, buttons, login and menus.

I will post some information of the desired UI later.

Brett

[BSampson]

For our group, we are also looking at IoT options.  We are ideally looking to easily create equipment dashboards that can segment individual pieces of hardware geographically, by subnet addresses, or other quick ways of slicing high level information (individual assets are green, yellow, or red). We can create this in LabVIEW right now, but being able to have a thin client accessible to anyone on the local network would be great.

From the high level, we want to drill down to individual assets which would all have an identical web page hosted directly from the equipment.  This would allow us to create master dashboards and then segment equipment access based on larger network configuration tools (ie, one plant could easily view all hardware locally, while a higher level facility could view assets between multiple sites). 

Individual webpages do not need significant data viewing capabilities.  We distill most information into scalar values and save engineering data to device storage which can be fetched on command and viewed in excel.  

[Jaidev]

Hi All,

Thank you for all the great responses. I have been synthesizing your feedback to make recommendations on our roadmap. I will follow up with additional questions as necessary.

As we work through planning our roadmap and the Web technology team is planning to do a small closed door session to collect some feedback on specific parts of our plan. If you are interested in participating please raise your hand here. If your application is relevant to the decisions that we are trying to make, I would love to have you sit down with us.

To attend the Closed Door feedback session, you’ll need to be at NIWeek on 8/2/2016 in person at 3PM. You will also need to sign an NDA if we do not already have one in place.

Thanks,