DISCLAIMER: this is what I know about Elemental, and my interpretation of it, and I haven't yet looked closely at it (its internals). Everything below can be read online (e.g. on Google+)
On Tuesday, July 10, 2012 12:34:13 AM UTC+2, mp31415 wrote: > > I'm trying to make some sense from that Elemental feature. But I'm > definitely missing something. On 2.5 main page there is a link to a brief > article about Elemental which really does not add much. GWT team is > notoriously bad on documentation side and it's not getting any better. Just > please don't tell me to shut up and use something else. It's impossible to > see the big picture without some background information, like what was > missing before, what real purpose of the feature is. It's very nice that we > can now call some latest API but what about the more trivial stuff that say > UiBinder was in charge so far? Or maybe it is not about UI but more about > better hiding JSO types? Or something totally different at all? The main thing about Elemental is that, for the most part, it's auto-generated, which makes it a breath to maintain: grab the IDL files from WebKit (yes, the same files that are being used to generate the C++ code that powers Chrome and Safari, themselves being more or less copies of what can be found in W3C specs) and regenerate the Java files out of them. The goal is to be as close to the browser as possible, removing all abstraction layers. That implies there's no deferred-binding being used: it's not meant to hide browser discrepancies, it's meant to be used in environments where those discrepancies don't exist or can be worked around in your code (code running in a UIWebView in a mobile "native" app, as a Chrome extension, or simply targeting only the most recent versions of browsers, where differences are vanishing a bit more each day that passes, thanks to the many standardization efforts). Ideally, you no longer produce 1 permutation for each user agent, but a single one running everywhere (just like everyone else doing web dev out there, in JS, CoffeeScript, Dart, etc.) In addition to that, Elemental is made of interfaces for the most part, so you can easily mock things in unit-tests, contrary to com.google.gwt.dom.client.* and the like. (BTW, UiBinder doing "trivial stuff"? really?) > It's not any better with all other features in fact, but right now my > gripe is about Elemental. > > I looked at the Collide project code. They reference elemental.* packages > all over the place and elemental classes carry copyright statement from > 2010. So is it new or just recently opened by Google? > Elemental is not new. It's only been open-sourced recently. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Web Toolkit" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-web-toolkit/-/VEaRwNLJXKIJ. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-web-toolkit?hl=en.
