UI Manager and Skins

[Chris Rafuse <cr...@cs.dal.ca>]

Can anyone provide a good explanation of:

1) What does UI mean?
2) What is the UIManager's purpose (it seems to manage html elements,
but a more detailed explanation would be great)
3) What are considered UI elements ?
3) How do skins work? ie. What is a skin? Are they loaded for each page?
What is the directory hierarchy for skins?

Thanks alot,



Chris


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Re: UI Manager and Skins

[Sean Legassick <se...@datamage.net>]

In message <10...@scallop.cs.Dal.Ca>, Chris Rafuse 
<cr...@cs.dal.ca> writes
>Can anyone provide a good explanation of:
>
>1) What does UI mean?

User Interface

>2) What is the UIManager's purpose (it seems to manage html elements,
>but a more detailed explanation would be great)

Basically just to suck in a property file and easily make key/value 
pairs available in templates.

>3) What are considered UI elements ?

Whatever you want (!)

To give you an example I use UIManager to provide:

* color values for my CSS stylesheet (which is dynamically generated). I 
find this useful as certain colors get repeated in several styles - if I 
want to change that color I just need to change it in one place.
* font sizes - same same, one place to change them
* size of generated charts (obvious fairly specific to my app)

>3) How do skins work? ie. What is a skin? Are they loaded for each page?

A skin is just a property file - the way I use UIManager the skin is 
hardcoded in TurbineResources.properties, but I think there are some 
changes to associate a skin with a given user's session.

>What is the directory hierarchy for skins?

<web app root>/resources/ui/skins/<skin name>/skin.props

-- 
Sean K. Legassick
sean@datamage.net
         informage - http://informage.net - mouthing off from the fairest cape

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AW: UI Manager and Skins

[Jürgen Hoffmann <jh...@byteaction.de>]

Not only does the UI Manager clone css. If one uses Images to decorate
tables, you can use different table decorations with each skin.

We have used this in a webapp we have devolopped, which has lots of
registered users. Caching is possible on the clientside.

Kind regards
 
Jürgen Hoffmann
ByteACTION GmbH
 
cert. Perl Programmer
cert. Linux System Administrator
cert. Java Programmer



-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Chris Rafuse [mailto:crafuse@cs.dal.ca] 
Gesendet: Dienstag, 3. Juni 2003 18:27
An: Turbine User Mailing List; TDK User List
Betreff: UI Manager and Skins


Can anyone provide a good explanation of:

1) What does UI mean?
2) What is the UIManager's purpose (it seems to manage html elements,
but a more detailed explanation would be great)
3) What are considered UI elements ?
3) How do skins work? ie. What is a skin? Are they loaded for each page?
What is the directory hierarchy for skins?

Thanks alot,



Chris


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RE: UI Manager and Skins

[Michael Mainguy <ma...@mich.com>]

I'll take a stab at this.  The UI manager appears to be for, in theory,
skinning your presentation.  I.E. if you want to change your
forground/background/font-size/images you can do it via the config file
instead of in a Cascading Style Shee or the HTML.  That having been said, I
haven't really delved too deeply into it and it seems like it's basically
the same thing as a CSS except the output ends up in your HTML instead of
stripped out into another file.  Actually, I'd liken it to server side CSS
or something like XSL.  Using a tool like that has advantages and
disadvantages and I'll give you my opinion on those.

Advantages:
  Consolidates User Interface (UI) look and feel data to a central location
  Allows UI data to be rolled directly into HTML without recoding in 100
different places
  Potentially obviates CSS incompatibilities between browser and seperate
file caching issues

Disadvantages:
  Look and feel is in a different place and in a different format from
almost all other web stuff
  Disallows caching of look and feel (LAF) data on the client
  Not terribly well documented (I haven't seen any, but, I haven't really
looked)



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Chris Rafuse [mailto:crafuse@cs.dal.ca]
> Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2003 12:27 PM
> To: Turbine User Mailing List; TDK User List
> Subject: UI Manager and Skins
>
>
> Can anyone provide a good explanation of:
>
> 1) What does UI mean?
> 2) What is the UIManager's purpose (it seems to manage html elements,
> but a more detailed explanation would be great)
> 3) What are considered UI elements ?
> 3) How do skins work? ie. What is a skin? Are they loaded for each page?
> What is the directory hierarchy for skins?
>
> Thanks alot,
>
>
>
> Chris
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: turbine-user-unsubscribe@jakarta.apache.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: turbine-user-help@jakarta.apache.org
>


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