The first XAP application?

[Bob Buffone <bb...@gmail.com>]

Hello XAP-DEV

Since the code commit of XAP I have been working on an application (in
my spare time) that allows users to create Maps with their own
collections of points. Users can descriptions, set images, share a
collection of points...

The URL is www.rockstarapps.com

It is by no means a rock solid application but is in fairly good
shape.  Any bugs that exist I blame on my son (Zack) for not finding
:)

For the most part I found using XAP quite easy to build the
application, most of the code I needed was specific to my business
logic.

A couple of things that I ran into building the application and need
to customize some code were,

1.) I wanted to add a loading screen. This proved to be the most
difficult part of building the application. It seemed that Zimbra
wanted to take over the screen and I had to change it remove any
content already displayed.

2.) The loading process of the application was and still is a little
slow. I used the compression in XAP then modified the XAP code to load
a single file which I compiled using PHP on the server.  These changes
reduced the number of round trips from over 150 to just 1. The
compression reduced the size of the download from 2mb to .5mb;  There
were also files include that weren't needed or just missing, All of
which were in the zimbra code.

3.) Create a nice stylesheet - This took the longest.  I just kept it
simple with a few colors, and one beveled image for the tabs.  I also
had to customize the tabs to get the hover line to appear correctly
above the tab text. I did run into browser compatibility problems
loading images for my stylesheet.  IE seem to forget the correct
directory to load the image from and my bevel tab image would not show
up correctly. I ended up changing the stylesheet location to get it to
work.

4.) Wanted a header for the application.  XAP not having layout
capability yet forced me to use a tab control then reformat it's tab
bar during the loading process.  This worked nicely, once I came up
with the solution.

5.) Easy to understand directory structure.  This was not necessary
but makes it easier to look at and find things.

I ended up breaking the directory structure down as follows

   Root/
      Application (All my application specific resources)
		Mco (all mcos)
		PHP (app php code)
		Stylesheets (application specific stylesheets)
      Xap (All xap code)
	XapCompressed (all compressed code)
	
      ...
	Web site resources

Couple things I wanted but didn't try to do or gave up doing were:
1.) Scrolling tree control
2.) Modal dialog

If there was one thing that hindered me it was debugging and logging.
A way to log the returns RequestService and also display the DOM would
be helpful.

Give the application try, I plan on updating the code periodically to
add more functionality and as more XAP functionality comes online I
will also incorporate it as well.

Any question on how things were done send and I will answer, also I
will put up the code on the site soon.

Bob (Buffone)