[Dynapi-Dev] Directions in 2001 - IDE, loadpanel

[Al B. <by...@lo...>]

Hello All,

I have noticed some talk about using loadpanel in conjunction with
forms. This is an area of great interest to me. Automating the
generation of forms and their interaction with the host is the crux of
an integrated development environment (IDE). I see IDE as being the
biggest current open niche in the open source arena and DynAPI could
play a huge part if there were such an effort to develop one.

I think the key to a successful IDE will be the incorporation of XML
technology - it will strike a responsive chord with the industry and it
solves some real problems (see below). Over the past couple of years
Local Square has developed a client/server environment in which XML is
passed to and from  browser forms via XML (we also can send HTML). I
have developed a lightweight psuedo-XML parser in Javascript. We have
tools to generate the necessary forms and scripts from a database table
definition. The system is designed to be distributed - using Apache/HTTP
as the transport and Perl as the scripting language. It is highly
object-oriented - both in Perl and Javascript.

DynApi is playing a key role in this system in two important ways:
1) The use of DynApi widgets in conjunction with forms, can give the
processing of data a lot of the amenities that normally would be
associated with desktop or Java apps. Things like a responsive menu,
popup boxes for selections and help, etc. The fact that data is kept on
the client also improves the response time.

2) We are currently using DynApi(1) to implement a drag and drop
environment for laying out web pages. This is for e-commerce, but it
could have lots of other uses. Because of the varied nature of the data
structure for pages built this way (they would have special embedded
"objects"), XML is the best vehicle for transmitting and storing this
data. And it leaves us in a position to take advantage of the
forthcoming XSLT work to render the XML.

There is also a third area - using loadpanel to transmit the data. We
have struggled with this problem - having used 1) a hidden frame to do
the transmission (it is fragile and messes up the expected operation of
the "Back" key), 2) the precursor to loadpanel (it is also fragile and
suffers from a limitation on the size of data that can be uploaded and
3) urlPipe, a Java applet developed at www.kisai.com (they don't seem to
be there anymore?) (it seemed to work great except for some special
problems that only affected our work. But no source code). Note that the
folks at allaire.com seem to be interested in this use of XML (they have
a protocol called WDDX ) and I have seen urlPipe mentioned there.

Our company has toyed with the idea of making our work open source. If
anyone is interested in this type of project, please respond here or to
me directly so that I have something to take to our management. The
beauty of such an endeavor is that when we are done, instead of being
able to share widgets with which we build apps, we will be able to share
complete and compatible applications - moving DynApi into the ASP arena.

-Al

--
Al Byers
Local Square, Inc.
826 N. Augusta St.
Staunton, VA 24401
540.213.0500
www.localsquare.com
by...@lo...