[1.x] Widget enhancements

[Luciano Resende <lu...@gmail.com>]

While our current Widget extension provides good functionality to
allow Web 2.0 applications easy access to SCA Services, we have some
issues around browser support, JavaScript code optimization, etc. I
want to start some prototyping around this area to create some
extension points that would allow different bindings to plug it's own
version of the JavaScript Proxy used by JavaScript SCA References.
With this, we could use specialized frameworks, such as Dojo, and
leverage the strengths of such framework and it's native support for
things like json-rpc, atom, etc in the Widget Implementation.

For now, I'll try to make this optional, but once I start making
progress, we could evaluate if we want to continue maintaining our own
set of JavaScript, or we are comfortable migrating to use a spcific
framework to give us the necessary support. Also, as Dojo already have
native support for json-rpc and atom, I'll start playing with that in
my prototypes.


Thoughts ?

-- 
Luciano Resende
Apache Tuscany, Apache PhotArk
http://people.apache.org/~lresende
http://lresende.blogspot.com/

Re: [1.x] Widget enhancements

[ant elder <an...@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 10:43 PM, Luciano Resende <lu...@gmail.com>wrote:

> While our current Widget extension provides good functionality to
> allow Web 2.0 applications easy access to SCA Services, we have some
> issues around browser support, JavaScript code optimization, etc. I
> want to start some prototyping around this area to create some
> extension points that would allow different bindings to plug it's own
> version of the JavaScript Proxy used by JavaScript SCA References.
> With this, we could use specialized frameworks, such as Dojo, and
> leverage the strengths of such framework and it's native support for
> things like json-rpc, atom, etc in the Widget Implementation.
>

You should take a look at the implementation.web code that does exactly this
so you could just copy that code (i never did like how impl.widget hard
coded those).


>
> For now, I'll try to make this optional, but once I start making
> progress, we could evaluate if we want to continue maintaining our own
> set of JavaScript, or we are comfortable migrating to use a spcific
> framework to give us the necessary support. Also, as Dojo already have
> native support for json-rpc and atom, I'll start playing with that in
> my prototypes.
>

I agree this is a better approach, we should sync up as i'm doing similar
things with implementation.web and the DWR binding with support for JSONP,
just waiting for M1 to get out of trunk so i can start committing. Most web
frameworks support AJAX with various protocols like JSON or REST or POX
these days so i'm starting to think we should use those frameworks not try
to invent our own web client programming model like our web extensions have
been doing, or at least support those others anyway. There are a handle full
of popular ones that are easy to support, right now i'm using prototype,
jquery, and dojo, along with stripes, wicket, and jsf.

This also relates to the thread about Tuscany running in a webapp that you
haven't yet replied to here:
http://apache.markmail.org/message/3pxuxvdlk2h3aqmu

   ...ant