On Jun 11, 2008, at 6:07 PM, Jean-François Veillette wrote:
I was on the Pixar presentation by Dr. M.B.Johnson and
after it I asked him about the web technologies behind
their web2 apps.
It's php/python for server-side web app, perforce for
their file-version storage and a bd (oracle(?)).
The client side apps mainly use Ext and some more
custom javascript.
Can you tell us more about Ext and how easy (or not)
it is to integrate with WO ? how does it compare to
prototype ? what are the main design principle that
make it a good library ?
Take a look at http://www.extjs.com
Ext can be small or big. You can build your own ext.js and pick what
you need. Where Ext is controversial is in its licensing. They
recently changed their licensing and I need to find out what it
means. Maybe I'll go back to jquery or prototype. :-) They have a
dual licensing model. Commercial or Open Source. However, their open
source license is GPLv3. Anybody familiar with GPLv3 who would like
to comment. Licensing FAQ can be found here http://www.extjs.com/products/license-faq.php
but I still don't understand if that means I need to make my back
end source code public or not. If that's the case then that is a not
the license for me.
I use the core ext.js which is equivalent in functionality to
prototype.js or jquery.js. It provides the basic stuff such as
loading content from a URL, doing animations, querying the DOM, etc.
If you are familiar with prototype or jquery, I'm sure you know what
I'm talking about. Then on top of that they have widgets.
The Ext library has a ton of high quality widgets. I'm not using
those however. I only use the basic stuff I mentioned. And at this
level integrating with WebObjects is just as easy or difficult as it
would be with prototype or jquery. For example, you may want to
invoke a component action on a component on your page and generate the
HTML for that component. For that you simply load the content using a
component action URL. And so you just need to know how to do that in
ext, prototype or jquery. For example, in ext it would be something
like this:
Ext.get('MyUpdateContainerID').load(componentActionURL, options);
Or something similar to that. You get the idea. ;-) The difficult
part is having your application handle this request correctly. In
other words, it needs to know it's an ajax request. It needs to
process the form values just the input elements submitted, then invoke
an action in the right component on the page and generate a response
only for the component being updated and its subcomponents.
So this is the difficult part. The good news is that this HAS BEEN
SOLVED by the Ajax framework demoed by Mike. Did you go to WOWODC?
If not, you can find info on google. Just search for "WebObjects
Ajax examples" and I'm sure you'll find it. I believe Mike is
releasing a much more polished Ajax examples application in the not
too distant future. I understand you do not need to use Wonder to use
to tap into Ajax.
Once you have this figured out, then you can move to using widgets and
things start falling into place more naturally.
So I would say, you take a look at Mike's Ajax example app. The core
components are very easy to use. Also look at the podcasts about
WebObjects in iTunes. You'll find info there too.
- Ricardo Parada
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