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

[Neil Mix]

Yes!  This would be great.  -Neil

On Nov 29, 2005, at 1:44 PM, Henry Minsky wrote:

> What I am beginning to think is that there need to be two different  
> instantiation APIs
> for components, one which is designed to be called from LZX (XML),  
> which does
> a lot of "automagic" setup, and one designed to be called from  
> script, which exposes all
> the individual steps as much as possible. So you can decide for  
> example to instantiate a
> menu item before there is a parent to add it to, or if you need to  
> add it to a place in
> the parent which isn't at the end of the current list of items.
>
> Tucker has proposed using something besides "new" to create new  
> components in script. I think that is a good idea, but maybe we  
> need to go one step further and have some conventions for two  
> different standard ways to instantiate a component:
>
> One way is the "LZX" way, where you pass a parent view, and an  
> arglist, so that "new MyFrob(...)" behaves as much as possible like  
> using <MyFrob> in LZX; as much magic as possible is done to install  
> the object into it's parent environment.
>
>  And the other would be the "script" way, which behaves in a more  
> modular fashion, so you would expect to manually instantiate an
> object, then add it to a parent or not at your discretion, and set  
> callbacks and event handlers, etc, manually.
>
>
>
> On 11/29/05, Don Hopkins <dhopkins at donhopkins.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Henry Minsky
> Software Architect
> hminsky at laszlosystems.com
>
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