Re: Questions about netwindows, probably a faq

On Sun, Apr 04, 2004 at 01:06:47PM -0800, Alex Russell wrote:
> > 	How does netwindows compare in functionality to other dhtml
> > toolkits, such as activeui/activewidgets?
> 
> I hadn't really looked at activewidgets, but it's interesting to see 
> another toolkit taking our on-load parsing idea and running with it 
> almost in parallel to our work. This toolkit looks new-ish. Do you 
> know the people behind it? Do they have widgets beyond this grid 
> thing?
> 

	It doesn't seem like they do, though the docs seem to claim there
are.

> As for how we compare to other toolkits, we are DOM-based (no NN4 
> support) and the guiding philosophy for the toolkit is to help the 
> browser out where the browser can't do something itself. This means 
> we attempt to avoid duplicating functionality where possible and we 
> try to support standards in principle wherever it makes sense. We've 
> done a lot of work to support "degradeable DHTML" and the toolkit has 
> been designed to be easily useable for both developers and end users. 
> I think all of those things make us very different from many of the 
> other toolkits you'll find.
> 
> As for raw number of widgets, I don't think we're the most capable in 
> that regard, but we're getting there.
> 

	My own "pie in the sky" wish is to be able to have a toolkit to
write web applications with. This, in my mind, means replicating
(where necessary) all the lowest level objects available in windowing toolkits
and aggregating them into widget classes where possible. Certainly you can't
do everything in javascript (such as canvas widgets), but you can get most
of the way there as netwindows demonstrates.

	With a full suite of basic widget classes and a message passing
mechanism (both of which netwindows has to a great degree) it will be
possible to replicate many complex applications directly on the web, where all
the UI stuff is directly handled by the client but application logic is done
by the server, maybe in an explicit fashion using SOAP (web services in ms
parlance) as a language independent API.

	So that's _my_ goal: to replicate a base set of widgets in a
consistent manner to form a gui application toolkit, not just a clever set
of handy widgets as some of the other libs seem to offer. I don't care about
handy widgets, I care about extensible base widgets - handy widgets will flow
from those.

	Netwindows seems like it's mostly there, but there doesn't seem to
be the explicit goal of supporting a specific toolkit's set of widgets - or
did I miss it? I noticed the signal/slot mechanism which is similar to that
used by qt, but there's no mention that supporting qt base widgets is a goal.
	Also, unless I missed it, there doesn't seem to be a set of geometry
management tools - I think that's what they're called - methods such as
'place' and 'pack' as there are in other toolkits. I suspect that wasn't
part of the original goal since typically formatting is done in html itself,
but it would be important for an application toolkit.

	Anyway, I can't tell if that's either a really obvious idea and
basically what you're up to, or if it's just crazy and not close at all, but
it _sounds_ cool. If we could do it and have performance not suck too horribly
people would beat down our doors to get it.

	Seriously, is that nuts?

	Austin

_______________________________________________
The netWindows developers list: [email protected]
http://netwindows.org/mailman/listinfo/devel_netwindows.org