Archive for August, 2007

The Curl IDE in the context of a web page versus Seaside ‘halos’

Sunday, August 12th, 2007

Over at blogspot I have a post on inspecting objects ‘live’ in web pages.
What I neglect to mention there is what is really nice if you are used to using Mercury Interactive and that is the fact that inspectors allow you to flip some properties of an object ‘live’ in your web page.

Suppose you have an inspector open on a widget which occurs more than once on your page. With one click on the inspector’s toolbar you get a color-picklist. You can flip the color of the inspected widget’s background or border ‘live’ on the web page in your browser. Ah … that ListBox!

Curl does not use <FORM> elements in web pages; instead, Curl uses the GUI widgets familiar to anyone who has been building Rich applications in Tk, Smalltalk, Swing or most any other GUI framework.

Once you Ctrl-Right-Click on a Curl control on a web page you will see why I now rank the Curl IDE up there with Seaside for Smalltalk or XOTclIDE (the extended OTcl IDE.)

In the Curl web framework a CONTROLLER represents a joystick-type device and a ‘control’ such as a TreeControl is a CONTROL. No “let’s all pretend this is MVC because that is the OOP TLA” mantra. But with anonymous procedures and macros. As I said, COOL. Maybe not REST, but COOL enough with SOAP or XMLHttpRequest. As those of us with teens have had occasion to say, ‘Give it a rest, will ya?…’

PS Comes with built-in profiling, test coverage for QTP and even HTTP monitoring. A web content language from MIT with lambda functions that does not even look like LISP. Not bad. Readable code for literate web programming. Nothing clever embedded in HTML comments.

|| COOL
|| web2.0
|| comments

and

|COOL-tag
|| web2.0
|| documentation
COOL-tag|

Not a kluge and most have not a clue. Oh yes, MIT. CLU. What was her name?

Posted in Curl Surge, Software development | No Comments »

groovy Grails tips and cheatsheet

Tuesday, August 7th, 2007

Note: For IE7 or Firefox to open any of the links in this post in a tab rather than a new window, hold down a CTRL key when your click a link.
Over at eclectic-pencil.blogspot.com I have some notes on getting Grails up and running without having to chase through a FAQ and some mail-list threads. I may add a few pages here. At the moment I am completely absorbed with the RIFE web app framework, so that may get a few pages as well. RIFE continuations are a great introduction to the Seaside continuations framework for folks more at home with Java. RIFE is also a framework in more than name-only. And the author of the framework aims it at java developers with no promises of ‘RIA without programming’ and, well, less hype: they do stretch the 80-20 rule in claiming that “you get 90% of the features with 10% of the usual effort, thanks to its full stack.” RIFE continuations use pause(), rather like Ruby uses yield(), so that is another avenue to approach RIFE. The RIFE wiki has a page on using groovy with RIFE so life will be interesting. Here is a recent Artima piece on JRuby and RIFE. The article has a link worth visiting on Terracotta with RIFE.

Posted in Software development, Tool tip | No Comments »

Hyper ZK

Monday, August 6th, 2007

‘AJAX without JavaScript‘ is what you can expect managers to be talking about and ZK is something they may mention because at one time ZK marketing made that claim on their ‘Simply Rich’ homepage. Here are some useful quotes.

The first line of any ZK applet:

<noscript><p style="color:red">Sorry, JavaScript must be enabled.<br/>Change your browser options, then
<a href="">try again</a>.</p></noscript>

Here is a quote from the ZK site:

Browsers without JavaScript at all is another platform, also a challenge. We’d like to see if we can make them talk in ZK.

And this:

We are working with our partner to deliver an intuitive visual design tool that works with Eclipse IDE.

And if that is not enough, this gem:

To work with existent applications more efficiently, ZK components will be ready in the form of JSP tags. We also consider the possibility to provide them in JSF.

ZK is considered to be hot, but Mozilla + XUL is not. A rising tide does not lift all boats: some are sunk, have too must ballast or are otherwise already scuttled.

One ZK claim is that they have been able to use BeanShell to show what a good scripting language Java is. That should give you pause.

And they promise to offer scripting for Ruby (they may mean JRuby) and Groovy.

The only answer is to look at what the product offers (libraries? a framework? an RTE? a consistent API?) and requires (less web scripting, but more java programmers?) and then to look at genuine alternatives. The promise of a visual environment in Eclipse, so many years after the failure of visual environments to adequately address complex callbacks is taken up on my page … AJAX = AWAX.

It might seem that the choice between ZK and the GWT is obvious. I don’t think so, and I try to suggest why not. It is even claimed that they are complementary approaches. Perhaps in fairness ZK is more of a framework – but it is such a conflicting mix that after some initial enthusiam I am left completely lost as to its intent.

If nothing else it breaks any easy association of AJAX with RIA and that may confuse your manager. Then there is the claim that it allows building an RIA ‘without programming‘. I prefer the AJAX ‘without JavaScript’ claim.

The best outline of the ZK framework that I found was an image reproduced at Ajax Magazine.

As for hype there is ZK’s own claim to be “#1 Ajax project on SourceForge.net” and they report that they are finalists in the 2007 SourceForge community awards in 3 categories: “Best Tool and Utility for Developers,” “Best User Support” and “Best Technical Design”.

Posted in RIA, Software development | 5 Comments »