Re: Re: about your concept

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Thursday 22 July 2004 18.48 skrev Dunne, James(Summer Hire):
> Then there comes the problem of the server-client-server roundtrip you
> stated.  That could be alleviated by defining custom widgets based on the
> server-side widgets available, like you suggested.  Server-side widgets
> would consist of simple things like scrollable lists, grid layouts,
> textboxes, buttons, labels, scrollbars, tab controls, etc.  You could
> compound all these together to define a custom widget.  Following that
> idea, a nice way of uniformly defining custom widgets should be drawn up,
> for example an XML-like structure (transmitted minimally over network).
Maybe it would be possible to abstract server-side behaviors, such as 
"scrollable", or "clickable" and provide template-based reactions to those 
events, as well as a "custom" behavior which would pass on events to the 
client?

XML is a great language for many purposes, but perhaps we should also consider 
a format like EBML, or some own proprietary protocol to keep bandwidth-usage 
down to a minimum.

> And, as a fallback mechanism for custom widgets that can't be defined in
> terms of the basic server-side widgets, the client could send the painter
> bytecode on the fly for the current state of the widget that is completely
> client-controlled.  Also, these bytecodes could also be cached and assigned
> a server-generated unique identifier (sent to the client obviously, or have
> client+server assume an incremental identifier).  Then the client would
> only have to inform the server that "rendering bytecode ID# XXXX" should be
> used now.
This sounds EXACTLY like OpenGL displays-lists. And they have proven to work 
quite well over the years. Except for the time when my Nvidia-card refused to 
store anything, including the damn lists, in video memory and just puked all 
over my screen. ;) Just add a LITTLE more flexibility to the display 
list-concept and we've got something that works. ;)

I'm afraid there might be one slight problem more, though. Widgets may contain 
other widgets. (At least I think they should?) How do we solve layouting of 
widgets embedded in a custom widget? Behaviour? Client-feedback? That will 
probably require some thinking. ;)

> I'll think about this some more later.  Thanks for your input, Ulrik!
Hehe, your welcome. Thanks for your interest and input to the Y project. ;)

- -- 
"I've seen it.  It's rubbish."
- -- Marvin the Paranoid Android
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