Re: Re: about your concept

On 2004-07-23 01:39:26 +0800 Ulrik Mikaelsson <[email protected]> wrote:

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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. ;)
> 

maybe a pdf rendering model would be good idea? That looks like a generic widget drawing facility to me.