On Tue, Mar 08, 2005 at 09:01:59AM +0100, Reinhard Poetz wrote: > I was looking at http://wiki.apache.org/cocoon/WhiteBoardCocoonForms and I > liked what I saw.
Thanks for taking a look. Any refinements are welcome. Side note: Remeber items in the whiteboard are often initially motivated by an individual, but are intended for community ownership and involvement and potential merging into the mainline when/if ready. So, anybody can dive right in and make any changes that are needed. > This document defines reusable macro libraries. I'm sure this is useful for > some usecases (e.g. editors) but I have a simpler one that goes into the > direction of reusable form definitions. Macros give saving in maintenance, processing time, and memory usage. Maintenance -- one shared definition to edit instead of x instances. Processing -- definitions are are only parsed and built one time. Memory -- only one copy is stored for use in multiple forms. The maintenance savings are my main concern. By permitting reuse of snippets of bindings, form definitions, and templates you can more readily create and maintain consistent applications. For example, macros could be used to implement a common "search" sub-form for use throughout the many forms in an application, or to load and display common data in a consistent manner in multiple forms. > In many of my forms date widgets are used: birthdate, start date, end date, > ... Definining those widgets is nearly always the same, except the label. > IMO it would make sense not only to have reusable macro libraries but also > reusable widget libraries (renamed fd:macros to fd:library): I was already considering renaming fd:macros to fd:library; do you want to change it or should I? <!-- Snip specific example to discuss in separate email. --> --Tim Larson
