On Saturday 16 December 2006 18:27, Ryan Gahl wrote: > Create widget classes that encapsulate their own Ajax needs (i.e. > autonomous controls that handle their own html refreshing), and when > one redraws itself, re-attaches its own behaviors as needed. Each > widget can be viewed as its own mini-page.
I'm not convinced that approach will work in general. A concrete case I have in mind is this: I have a form where some input elements (kind as well as content) depend on the choices in other elements. Depending on what the user enters into the form, the dependent elements are updated by means of ajax requests. Also, the elements are continuously monitored by a purely client-side validator and immediately notify the user of invalid input. Unfortunately, these two concerns, dynamic form update and continuous validation, cut across each other. At the moment, they are blissfully ignorant of each other and that's how it ideally should be. The drawback is that dynamically (ex)changed input elements are not hooked into the validator. The solution you suggest would, in my understanding, engender that I replace the simplicity of <%= f.text_field :last_name %> with a client-side framework managing components -- "widgets". Widgets would be anything but simple, instead they would have to fulfill several contractual obligations for playing nicely with their encompassing framework, such as sending and receiving life-cycle events. In such an environment it would certainly be possible to keep the concerns I mention above separated, but at a huge cost of developing the infrastructure first. I certainly agree that it would be great to have a (standard) client-side component framework integrated with Rails. However, this is not the case, yet, and I'm very reluctant to stumble in that direction on my own. For what it's worth, there is a project aiming at integrating Dojo with Rails: http://rubyforge.org/projects/rojo/ I asked Alex Garrett about it at the beginning of August. He was then targetting end of August for a first release and mid October for "very railsy dojo widget integration". I take it as indicative of the effort involved that there has not been any release yet. Michael -- Michael Schuerig mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.schuerig.de/michael/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Spinoffs" group. 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/rubyonrails-spinoffs?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
