Re: Nw application development

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On Saturday 13 September 2003 6:18 am, Christian Boulanger wrote:
> > Note that this is incremental change, and not
> > invasive at all
> > unless you decide to write a pure netWindows app (like
> > Christian's).
>
> ... Yes,  I begin to notice that my approach is quite different
> from what I understand the developers of NW themselves focus on...

Actually, it's not. As you outline below, there seem to be two 
"classes" of NW apps emerging (incrmental usage, or full-bore NW 
apps), both of which I believe deserve first-class support. Hence our 
support of both inline and programatic constructors on almost every 
widget in the toolkit.

> There seem to be two different directions one can go with NW:
>
> 1) The page-centered approach of richt and diverse websites, which
> uses mainly inline-constructors and loads pages into windows as
> needed. This approach also support the idea of "degradable widgets"
> for browsers that cannot display nw widgets correctly.
>
> 2) The data-centered approach, which loads the complete application
> and a lot of the data at startup, and then works from there. This
> approach uses mainly programmatic constructors and relies on
> structured, mostly uniform data queried and sent by the server. In
> this setting, "degradability" is of course impossible to achieve.
>
> This is what I am trying to do... But the problem might be that I
> need to do almost everything programmatically, from populating
> tables with data to constructing forms. I don't know how well nw
> supports this approach at this point.

As well as any other DHTML toolkit you're going to use (if not 
better). Under the hood of the "inline" constructors is almost always 
a "regular" constructor and a bunch of method calls on the widget 
that just hide the programatic approach in a declarative style.

Doing things programaticaly in NW is always going to be a bit more 
verbose and difficult, but will ultimately be more flexible. I have a 
STRONG desire to see both incrmental and ground-up style applications 
be successful in using NW to get where they're going.

> I know that I want to stick with this approach because I don't want
> to have to load each bibliographic reference from the server when I
> want to do something with it - I want to have them in memory on the
> browser, and only have server interaction whenever something gets
> changed.... That's my idea of a real web application - to avoid
> roundtrips at all costs.... ( Another reason is that I really like
> javascript programming now as much as I begin to dislike
> PHP-style).

NW is designed, in part, to play to this kind of app design. Your app 
isn't out of the scope or conception of what I imagine NW to be good 
for, but rather one of the first publicly-available apps that's using 
the ground-up approach. That's all = )

Regards

- -- 
Alex Russell
[email protected]   BD10 7AFC 87F6 63F9 1691 83FA 9884 3A15 AFC9 61B7
[email protected] F687 1964 1EF6 453E 9BD0 5148 A15D 1D43 AB92 9A46
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