The greatest thing since sliced bread

Hi everybody,

I've been playing with AIDA/Web for a project and am so far very impressed. I really like the ease with which you can bind objects to form controls and the Ajax stuff seems much easier to work with than Seaside's. That plus the ability to make a RESTful site are what won me over.

I plan on having quite a few views where there will be a list of objects that don't contain many fields. At the bottom of this list will be a small form to allow people to quickly add new objects without having to load an separate view. I plan to accomplish this by having a singleton class representing all the "real" objects in our dataset and placing instance variables in views to represent new objects that are not yet live.

Is there a fundamental flaw with this plan? Does this make sense? Is there a better way to do this?

Thanks,
Eli
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Hi Eli,

Eli Green pravi:

> I've been playing with AIDA/Web for a project and am so far very impressed. I really like the ease with which you can bind objects to form controls and the Ajax stuff seems much easier to work with than Seaside's. That plus the ability to make a RESTful site are what won me over.

Very nice to hear that!

> I plan on having quite a few views where there will be a list of objects that don't contain many fields. At the bottom of this list will be a small form to allow people to quickly add new objects without having to load an separate view. I plan to accomplish this by having a singleton class representing all the "real" objects in our dataset and placing instance variables in views to represent new objects that are not yet live.
>
> Is there a fundamental flaw with this plan? Does this make sense? Is there a better way to do this?

This plan perfectly correct. Making it ajaxified will make it even
better. In short:

1. put a table of object in a seperate method, say #tableElement.
2. send every input in form #onChangePost to post it after entering, let
it post it to a temporary new object.
3. add a button and send it #onClickUpdate: aTableElement. In above
#tableElement method then check at the start to see if a new element is
to be added.

This is a quick idea from my head, maybe not the most elegant, but one
of possibilities how to proceed towards the goal to have a fully
ajaxified entry to your list.

Best regards
Janko


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Hello Eli,

nice to see how the community grows!

EG> I plan on having quite a few views where there will be a list
EG> of objects that don't contain many fields. At the bottom of this
EG> list will be a small form to allow people to quickly add new
EG> objects without having to load an separate view. I plan to

a bit besides your point but if you put the input form at the top of
the list (if small enough) or at least put a link to the form at the
top of the list your users will be grateful.

They might have a smaller screen than you (if you limit the lists
length) or their lists might be longer than yours. Scrolling down for
(every) entry  is a pain.

Amongst other things I'm working to change the tutorial in this
direction.


Cheers,

Herbert                            mailto:[hidden email]

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On Friday, January 23, 2009, at 11:45AM, "Herbert König" <[hidden email]> wrote:
>Hello Eli,
>
>nice to see how the community grows!
>

Well, I'm still slightly nervous about deployment issues. Image-as-database makes perfect sense to me but my client knows SQL and may be more comfortable if I can persist to a RDBMS. We'll see. I'm prototyping in Smalltalk for now and will add external persistence later if I need to.

Does anybody know of a virtual hosting service that they have successfully run AIDA on?

>
>a bit besides your point but if you put the input form at the top of
>the list (if small enough) or at least put a link to the form at the
>top of the list your users will be grateful.
>

Good point. I guess it will depend on whether the form is primarily for data entry or for reviewing existing entries. I haven't checked the documentation - is it possible to make WebGrid scrollable so that always occupies a certain percentage of the available vertical space?

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Hello Eli,

EG> Well, I'm still slightly nervous about deployment issues.
EG> Image-as-database makes perfect sense to me but my client knows
EG> SQL and may be more comfortable if I can persist to a RDBMS. We'll
EG> see. I'm prototyping in Smalltalk for now and will add external
EG> persistence later if I need to.

I have an app (not web) in production with a mysql backend, it's just
more work to do on the model. Nowadays I would look at SqueakDBX and
not use the native driver.

If in image persistence is an option (amount of data) I would keep all
data in the image and just would add or change in the RDBMS.


EG> Does anybody know of a virtual hosting service that they have successfully run AIDA on?

If you find one, please tell me. When my web app is ready I'll start
looking for something like seaside has with seasidehosting.st. A free
or cheap hosting for free web services with an option to go
commercial if one exceeds what can be provided for free or wants a
commercial branch of ones web app. But I'm confident in this matter.

EG> haven't checked the documentation - is it possible to make WebGrid
EG> scrollable so that always occupies a certain percentage of the
EG> available vertical space?

Hopefully someone else will tell you but you always can handle this
yourself. In case of the tutorial one would add displayedAddresses
to AddressBookApp and an up down Button to viewMain of AddressBookApp.

But someone more knowledgeable might know better.


Cheers

Herbert                            mailto:[hidden email]

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Hi Janko,

I am going to end the Italian translaction of the tutorial; it has had a bit
longer because I checked the content with some students of mine that had a
very low level of Smalltalk knowledege; so, I made a tutorial for people
that is learning both Smalltalk and Aida.

It seems to me that the tutorial, as it is at present, has a loop; if you
insert a new address, you are redirected to edit it; the edit redirect it to
inserting and so on.

Changing the actionAdd of ADemoAddressApp to :

actionAdd

    self observee parent addAddress: self observee.
    self redirectTo: self observee parent view: #main

it seems to me that all work fine.

Do you mind checking it ?

Many thanks

Lorenzo

----- Original Message -----
From: "Janko Mivšek" <[hidden email]>
To: "AIDA/Web general discussion list" <[hidden email]>
Sent: Friday, January 23, 2009 12:25 AM
Subject: Re: [aida] The greatest thing since sliced bread


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Hi,
 
On Friday, January 23, 2009, at 12:25AM, "Janko Mivšek" <[hidden email]> wrote:
I've just had a moment to sit down and take a look at how this is done and from what I'm seeing there's no way to integrate the current action methods into this setup. What I would ideally like is to be able to say this:

(e addButtonText: 'Add' action #addObject) onClickUpdate: objectList.

Ideally, what the Ajax handler should do is to still call the normal actionMainAddObject before refreshing the objectList component. If we return "false" in the onClick javascript handler, the page will not actually be submitted normally. It's not a big issue but it would be nice to be able to code this consistently. It has the added benefit of being able to work whether the user's browser supports javascript or not but to be perfectly honest I'm not sure how many lynx/links users I need to worry about.

Oh, another benefit is that the form data gets posted all at once when the user has finished editing it, saving us the round-trips to and from the server.

Anyway, not a major complaint, just a suggestion!

Eli
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Eli Green pravi:

>> This is a quick idea from my head, maybe not the most elegant, but one
>> of possibilities how to proceed towards the goal to have a fully
>> ajaxified entry to your list.

> I've just had a moment to sit down and take a look at how this is done and from what I'm seeing there's no way to integrate the current action methods into this setup. What I would ideally like is to be able to say this:
>
> (e addButtonText: 'Add' action #addObject) onClickUpdate: objectList.
>
> Ideally, what the Ajax handler should do is to still call the normal actionMainAddObject before refreshing the objectList component. If we return "false" in the onClick javascript handler, the page will not actually be submitted normally. It's not a big issue but it would be nice to be able to code this consistently. It has the added benefit of being able to work whether the user's browser supports javascript or not but to be perfectly honest I'm not sure how many lynx/links users I need to worry about.
>
> Oh, another benefit is that the form data gets posted all at once when the user has finished editing it, saving us the round-trips to and from the server.
>
> Anyway, not a major complaint, just a suggestion!

Current action methods work nicely and follow MVC faithfully for views
in your Apps. But for standalone ajaxified components, which can be
reusable among different Apps and not only among views on the same App,
well, here we have a problem.

Where to put action methods in this case? To a component itself? To
every App where this component runs?

I have not yet a good answer, every suggestion or thought is therefore
welcome.

Janko


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Le samedi 24 janvier 2009 à 11:36 +0100, Janko Mivšek a écrit : Hi,

I think we already talked about it, and the result was that a way to do
it is to extend WebComponent to have actions (I know it would be a deep
change in Aida) and observee too.

Cheers!

Nico

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Hi Lorenzo,

Lorenzo Schiavina pravi:

> I am going to end the Italian translaction of the tutorial; it has had a bit
> longer because I checked the content with some students of mine that had a
> very low level of Smalltalk knowledege; so, I made a tutorial for people
> that is learning both Smalltalk and Aida.

This would be very nice to translate back to English too. A tutorial for
both Smalltalk and Aida beginners!

Your one redirects back to address book, while  the original one should
redirect to the main view of address itself:

  actionAdd
     self observee parent addAddress: self observee.
     self redirectToView: #main

This should definitely work if you have #viewMain implemented as in
tutorial. I therefore don't understand from where the loop. Can you
recheck again, specially if AddressApp>>viewMain is mplemented properly?

Best regards
Janko


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Herbert König pravi:

> EG> Does anybody know of a virtual hosting service that they have successfully run AIDA on?
>
> If you find one, please tell me. When my web app is ready I'll start
> looking for something like seaside has with seasidehosting.st. A free
> or cheap hosting for free web services with an option to go
> commercial if one exceeds what can be provided for free or wants a
> commercial branch of ones web app. But I'm confident in this matter.

I plan to replace my collocated server with a new one with virtual
server support. Then one virtual server can be for free Aida hosting
too. Other probably for commercial ones. What is then needed of course
is to develop and admin app for such hosting ...

New server will be there in a month or two. Admin app, well, that's
harder to tell...

But you can host your Aida based image (specially Squeak one with
in-image VNC) on any virtual server. It is even easier because you don't
need any database. All needed is ssh and VNC access to your Squeak
image. At least I think so, I never tried by myself.

Well, I lately opened an account on Amazon Elastic Cloud. Maybe we can
try hosting one Aida web app there? Anyone interested on that?

Best regards
Janko


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Eli Green pravi:

> Good point. I guess it will depend on whether the form is
> primarily for data entry or for reviewing existing entries.
> I haven't checked the documentation - is it possible to make
> WebGrid scrollable so that always occupies a certain percentage
> of the available vertical space?

You can do that with CSS, just that I don't know from my mind, how.
Anyone has time too look for such CSS example?

Janko


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Herbert König pravi:
Better solution is to use filter fields
(see http://demo.aidaweb.si/?view=grid).

Having a table with lots of rows is never a good idea and calls for
better solution. That's why we have (besides paging) also very flexible
column filters in WebGrid. Use them!

Janko


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Hi,
If this can help, in a CSS BOX with defined dimension, you can define a scrolling behavior just setting the overflow: property to scroll, as in this small example

    width: 800;
    background-color: #F8F2FC;
    height:400px;
    overflow:scroll;

here if the size of the content of the box will exceed the dimension, scroll bars will be created by the browser .
Hope this can help
ciao
Giorgio



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Hello Giorgio,

gf> Hi,
gf> If this can help, in a CSS BOX with defined dimension, you
gf> can define a scrolling behavior just setting the overflow:
gf> property to scroll, as in this small example

good to know but I assume this still means, that for any added entry
the whole list of entries has to be resent from the server?

Am I right?


Thanks

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Hello Janko,

JM> I plan to replace my collocated server with a new one with virtual
JM> server support. Then one virtual server can be for free Aida hosting
JM> too. Other probably for commercial ones. What is then needed of course
JM> is to develop and admin app for such hosting ...

Really don't know what the people from netstyle (seasidehosting) have
done in this regard.

JM> New server will be there in a month or two. Admin app, well, that's
JM> harder to tell...

as usual, you are too fast for me :-))

JM> But you can host your Aida based image (specially Squeak one with
JM> in-image VNC) on any virtual server. It is even easier because you don't
JM> need any database. All needed is ssh and VNC access to your Squeak
JM> image. At least I think so, I never tried by myself.

I have no knowledge of maintaining servers. That's why I thought of an
approach like netstyle. People provide the image and pay for the rest.

JM> Well, I lately opened an account on Amazon Elastic Cloud. Maybe we can
JM> try hosting one Aida web app there? Anyone interested on that?

In the very far future, when (if :-)) I'll have more customers than
two or three servers can handle....

Cheers

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Hello Janko,

JM> Better solution is to use filter fields
JM> (see http://demo.aidaweb.si/?view=grid).
is there something to learn from this example which can't be learned
from the tutorial? If so, I missed it.

JM> Having a table with lots of rows is never a good idea and calls for
JM> better solution.
Yes! Many bad examples on the net.

JM> That's why we have (besides paging) also very flexible
JM> column filters in WebGrid. Use them!

Filtering like used in the tutorial is only a good idea if you can
afford to display the whole list in case the user empties all filters.

As far as I browsed the code it's limited to String>>match:. Which is
nice now that I know it. With *m##er* I could find names containing
all variants of German "meier". Nice but the user has to know.

I think it depends on the size of the lists (in the model) if one can
rely on WebGrid's filtering capacity. For a big address book one would
start with the first say 25 entries starting with "a". Entering a "b"
into the filter would switch to the first 25 starting with "b",
entering "br" would jump to e.g. "Brandon" onward.

I think this is beyond the filter ability of WebGrid and this
behaviour belongs into AddressBookApp and not into WebGrid.

Tell me if you think I'm wrong, I'm planning for my own app.

It would display the last 10 lines in case of data entry or 5 lines
before and 4 lines behind the current entry in case of editing data.


Cheers

Herbert                            mailto:[hidden email]

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Herbert König pravi:

> gf> If this can help, in a CSS BOX with defined dimension, you
> gf> can define a scrolling behavior just setting the overflow:
> gf> property to scroll, as in this small example
>
> good to know but I assume this still means, that for any added entry
> the whole list of entries has to be resent from the server?
>
> Am I right?

Yep, but then turn on pagination and filters. That way you can handle
really big number of rows. I have an app here with near 10.000 of rows.
Without filters and pages you are in this case a dead man.

Janko

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Hi Giorgio,

Thanks for this CSS!

I'm wondering to include this to WebGrid by introducing a new method,
maybe #scrollableHeight: 400 ? Is this feature useful enough to support
it with such a method?

Janko

giorgio ferraris pravi:
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