Hello! As I have mentioned before, Siarhei Barysiuk and I have been working on XSLT stylesheets which transform xml templates into qooxdoo javascript. This is a feature that is still missing from qooxdoo and would be very useful (The exisiting javascript Builder is ok, but far too slow, and not flexible in its design since it statically translates xml tags into class names). Siarhei has designed the architecture of the stylesheets very flexible. By using templates, arbitrary xml tags can be mapped to snippets of code which "implement" a certain widget. So it is possible even to have alternative xml syntaxes for the same widget to fit the developer's style.
The whole system was initially designed for version 0.5 and worked quite well (see http://qxtransformer.sourceforge.net). Now we would like to adapt it to the upcoming version 0.7 and have a couple of questions. We don't know anything about the compile process (and won't have the time to learn about it) and therefore are dependent on the support of the core developers in integrating the xml->js generation process into the compile process. In particular, the developers would need to provide hooks and compile-time configuration options that enable us to integrate our work. One question is where the xml templates should be stored in the qooxdoo (skeleton) folder structure - this we happily leave to decide to the core developers. Another question is how the generated javascript object(s) should be integrated into the object hierarchy? One could think of having an attribute "classname" in the top-level widget like so <qx:window classname="custom.mynewwindow"> [all child widgets] </qx:window> This would then generate qx.Class.define ( "custom.mynewwindow", |{ extend : qx.ui.window, construct: function() { [here the main widget generation code is placed] } }); | and then the actual window would be called from Application.main: mynewwindow = new custom.mynewwindow(); mynewwindow.addToDocument(); // or this could go into the constructor Once this is done, one could even think of writing more stylesheets to transform xml produced by visual gui builders such as glade or qtdesigner (athough, of course, not everything can be mapped), or xul code. We think that would be an exciting prospect. We had started our own project at qxtransformer.sourceforge.net because at the time, it wasn't clear whether it was possible to contribute to the qooxdoo svn, and we certainly did not want to mail in patches for our own project. Once this is settled - I have heard that you are currently thinking about the issue - we can think about putting the code into the core svn. Siarhei is working on documentation so once the main questions are settled, we can restart the work and invite all interested developers to contribute.... Christian ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ qooxdoo-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/qooxdoo-devel
