[Laszlo-dev] designing API which is LZX friendlyand Javascript-friendly

[Don Hopkins]

What are the advantages of dynamically creating user interface
components through xml data binding, instead of using a JavaScript api? 

 

I’ve been playing around with pie menus for Laszlo, trying to come up
with a Laszlish way to dynamically create and configure them. 

 

http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/40

http://www.donhopkins.com/lzxnet/my-apps/PieTest.lzx

http://www.donhopkins.com/lzxnet/my-apps/PieTest.lzx?lzt=source

http://www.donhopkins.com/lzxnet/my-apps/piemenu.lzx?lzt=source

 

The Laszlo pie menus don’t currently support an API for modifying the
menus dynamically, but I’ve been thinking about how that should work,
and how it could support user-editable menus that knew how to write
themselves back out as XML. 

 

Some pie menus are dynamically generated from data, so all items are
usually handled the same (or from a small set of pre-defined handlers
based on the dataset), but other pie menus are designed by hand with
custom handlers, tracking feedback and graphical resources associated
with each item. 

 

One problem with only defining widgets from XML, is how do you attach
custom methods and event handlers to widgets? 

 

Including custom JavaScript handlers and constraints in the widget xml
definition would require a JavaScript compiler in the Flash player (but
it would be possible in the DHTML version of Laszlo). You have to
pre-define all the handlers and constraint expressions as named
functions, refer to their names in the xml, and look them up at
run-time. 

 

            -Don

 

 

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