[Seaside] Re: Seaside Widgets & SqueakMap example

Yanni Chiu yanni at rogers.com
Sat May 22 05:13:38 CEST 2004


Avi Bryant wrote:
> 
> ... One thing to look at might be to do a web-based builder, maybe
> extending the halo system that's already there. ...
> Because of the way models seem to propagate down your tree, I think it
> would be very valuable to do the UI building with a live example of the
> model in place, so that you can easily show which selectors are
> available to be hooked up at each level and so on.

I guess it's time to upgrade to the newer Seaside version
(I forgot to mention which version I was using). I'd read
about the halo stuff, but it never occurred to me to extend
it, as you're suggesting. I'd been putting off installing
wxWidgets; now maybe I won't have to -- a live builder
is much more appealing.

However, one side benefit of wxWidgets could have been to
leverage the same screens for a native widget option. But,
I've this nagging feeling that the result will be disappointing
because of differing UI interaction style. The option may still
be open, if the process is reversed, by generating the wxWidget
stuff from Squeak.

> 
> The one thing I especially miss about the renderer in such models is
> the ease with which you can do iteration and conditional logic.  It's
> just so much nicer to use real Smalltalk control structures than to
> have an IterationNode or ConditionalTag or whatever, as you usually get
> in template or widget-tree systems.  I haven't yet come up with a good
> way of unifying those two approaches, however.

Iteration seems to be nice enough (see UISequence). I've yet
to handle conditionals though. It's come up in a few cases,
but I've not attacked it yet.

Thanks for your comments.

--yanni



More information about the Seaside mailing list