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The earliest outliners were designed as writing tools and developed as stand-alone applications running on desktop PCs. Since those early days, outlining has spread to other application categories, into desktop operating systems and onto the World Wide Web. Outliners are used to organize file systems, presentations, large documents and Internet directories.
In 2006, I did something new with outlines - at least for me. I developed an AJAX outliner that's part of an enterprise security product. In one case this outliner is also a bar chart. Every headline has a segmented bar showing the health of servers in groups. As you go up the hierarchy, you see broader rollups. With a quick glance and a few clicks, administrators can get a great summary of enterprise security and easily zoom in to deal with specific problems.
The application is the Determina Management Console (DMC). At Determina, I'm responsible for designing and implementing the front-end user experience. DMC is web-based and the storage is a MySQL database. The server-based application is written Java with Struts. Delivery and presentation is done with client-side JavaScript, XML/HTTP, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and Dynamic HTML (DHTML). It's one flavor of AJAX.
The bar chart outline shows a hierarchy of Domains. The Root Domain is the home headline and the Child Domains are subheads. Any Domain can have Server Groups in it as well. Domains are typically used to manage configurations and user permissions. Server Groups are used to bundle servers that have the same users and configurations.
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With just a glance and some clicks an administrator can view the overall enterprise health and zoom in to find problems. Red servers are down. Green, yellow and orange servers are either active or becoming so. Gray servers are offline and purple servers have expired software licenses. When a problem - such as a set of down servers - is spotted, an administrator can expand the outline subheads to dive deeper, or click the red area to view a report. The Domain names, Server Group names and all the colored segments are hyperlinks. Clicking the red segment in a Server Group will display a status report with full details for the down servers in that Server Group only. Clicking the red segment for the Root Domain shows the details for every down server, enterprise wide.
As with most outliners, the plus and minus icons on the left edge are used for expanding and collapsing subheads. Clicking to expand triggers a client-side script that uses XML/HTTP to request subheads from the server. The subheads are returned as HTML that is inserted into a DIV tag using the browser Document Object Model (DOM). Clicking to collapse deletes the subheads ensuring that a fresh copy is retrieved on the next expand.
Outlines have long been recognized for their ability to zoom in and out, showing and hiding details. The bar chart adds another dimension, allowing users to find specific information even more rapidly. The feedback from customers has been strongly positive because the outline bar chart solves an important problem. With it, enterprises can really manage thousands of servers without losing site of the big picture and without losing the ability to find specific problems very rapidly.
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