Web controls for Seaside

In order to ease the work with our web application  we have added component support for Seaside. It's what is called "AJAX Framework" out there, although we preferred not to call it "framework" nor toolkit by now. Much of the ideas of this package are based on WindowBuilder Pro, a commercial window builder that enables visual programming.  

Right now we have support for most common web controls (TextField, Panel, RadioButton, TextArea, Label, Button, Anchor, CheckBoxGroup, RadioButtonGroup, ListBox, FieldSet) and we are working on a builder tool for generate Seaside components (pages) dinamically. We call it SeasideBuilder.  

Using our package, for example, if you want to specify a ListBox of countries you have to (without the builder):

>>countryControl
    "Private - Answer a ListBox with the countries. If panes not includes it then this is added"  

    ^self  
        paneNamed: #countryList
        ifNonePut: [ (SFListBox new)
                        printSelector: #viewerString;
                        styleClass: 'large';
                        items: self countries;  
                        label: 'País';
                        layout: self layout;
                        addItem: nil labelFrom: 'Ninguno';
                        when: #selectedChanged  
                             send: #selectedItem
                            to: self;
                        yourself]

and it's rendered with:

>>renderContentOn: html  
    "Private - Render the receiver"  
    
    html render: self countryControl

With the builder you'll have to pick the control you want, configure properties, preview if you want it, and finally add to a page layout tree. When the tree is already configured properly, code for the rendering and controls is compiled into the class, along with tree support for future editing with the tool, although this is under heavy developement.  

Maybe this work could be interesting for someone out there. If so,  we'd have to ask our institution for permission to release a public version under an appropiate licensing (GPL, LGPL, BSD, etc).  

Juan M. Burella, Hernán Morales and Norberto Manzanos, CAICYT  
<A href="http://www.caicyt.gov.ar" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">http://www.caicyt.gov.ar

I'm very very interested in seeing this happen. Do you have any idea how long before we might see it?

On Jun 15, 2007, at 10:59 AM, Burella Juan M. wrote:

In order to ease the work with our web application  we have added component support for Seaside. It's what is called "AJAX Framework" out there, although we preferred not to call it "framework" nor toolkit by now. Much of the ideas of this package are based on WindowBuilder Pro, a commercial window builder that enables visual programming.  

Right now we have support for most common web controls (TextField, Panel, RadioButton, TextArea, Label, Button, Anchor, CheckBoxGroup, RadioButtonGroup, ListBox, FieldSet) and we are working on a builder tool for generate Seaside components (pages) dinamically. We call it SeasideBuilder.  

Using our package, for example, if you want to specify a ListBox of countries you have to (without the builder):

>>countryControl
    "Private - Answer a ListBox with the countries. If panes not includes it then this is added"  

    ^self  
        paneNamed: #countryList
        ifNonePut: [ (SFListBox new)
                        printSelector: #viewerString;
                        styleClass: 'large';
                        items: self countries;  
                        label: 'País';
                        layout: self layout;
                        addItem: nil labelFrom: 'Ninguno';
                        when: #selectedChanged  
                             send: #selectedItem
                            to: self;
                        yourself]

and it's rendered with:

>>renderContentOn: html  
    "Private - Render the receiver"  
    
    html render: self countryControl

With the builder you'll have to pick the control you want, configure properties, preview if you want it, and finally add to a page layout tree. When the tree is already configured properly, code for the rendering and controls is compiled into the class, along with tree support for future editing with the tool, although this is under heavy developement.  

Maybe this work could be interesting for someone out there. If so,  we'd have to ask our institution for permission to release a public version under an appropiate licensing (GPL, LGPL, BSD, etc).  

Juan M. Burella, Hernán Morales and Norberto Manzanos, CAICYT  
<a href="http://www.caicyt.gov.ar" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">http://www.caicyt.gov.ar