T5 Asset locations/overall design

[Bruce Petro <bp...@artromick.com>]

I've been able to get assets loading if I place them with the pages
(read: java page files) and load them via Java syntax. I understand in
some cases there can be java page files without templates so that
behavior is correct as far as it goes. However for any page with
significant GUI building it's usually done by a non-programmer and
always originally built with images and assets placed in relation to the
html files.

 

Of course, for the sake of including programming, then we take an html
file and alter it to be an xhtml "template" and make minor alterations
so the images and assets get loaded via the java page, then simply
referenced in the template rather than actually loaded there.

 

I know there is NO perfect answer for all phases of projects, but for a
large project with complex graphical pages (and heaven help if often
modified graphical pages) that could get to be a bit onerous. Are there
plans to somewhat improve this any?

 

Right off, the java page file already knows where to find the template -
can it also look relative to the template for the images?  We would
still have to modify the original html to alter the original loading
statements, but it seems (a) easier to leave the images where they were
relative to the html (template) files and (b) more proper to get image
files out away from java classes, keeping the java code more "off to
itself" rather than encumbered with a bunch of image files intermingled.


 

Of course, long-term, a much more difficult but wonderfully magical step
might be for Tapestry to read the template's original image loading
syntax and re-translate those if necessary to create the asset loading
code in the java page class to properly send assets across. That would
be great then since as long as we ensure the document sticking to strict
xml structure, it could then be accurately viewed / modified in the GUI
builder, but still viable to a Tapestry application. (note that DW now
includes a strict xhtml setting).  But I'm guessing that all of this is
probably a phase-two / nice-to-have type thing. But keep it in mind.
With that design assets can be loaded via java or can be inferred from
the original GUI author's html-loading syntax. But again, we could live
with altering original page designs until the core is solid enough to
begin heading out into these sorts of things - yet a nice first step
would be to just add template relative searching for the assets
themselves.

 

Any thoughts?  Am I missing a design overview that would explain this
some other way that I'm not catching?