[Seaside] Graphing in Javascript

[Philippe Marschall]

> A JavaScript solution, that does not work reliably on all
> browsers is useless, most of our customers still use IE.
Well it all depends. Yes we have an application that has 100% IE users
but we also have an application that has just one (1) IE user and that
could be converted rather easily.

Last time I checked Pier looked crap on IE. Some Magritte components
only work on Safari. For the longest time SqueakSource displayed the
activity icon only on Safari. We have an application that's broken on
Opera because of JavaScript, the list goes on.

The point is it easily increases the visual fidelity for most on-IE
users and you can still have a fallback with PieChartMorph/PlotMorph.

> Maybe there is a reliable JavaScript engine supporting the Canvas API
> that could be interfaced from Squeak to draw the graphs on the server?
> That would avoid the porting from JavaScript ;-)
Somehow all this JavaScript stuff for webapplications seems to me like
C for desktop applications. ;-)

> I once saw a demo of a JavaScript parser/visitor that worked on the
> Smalltalk AST, I don't know if that would be useful?
I don't know, I will have to look at it. The tricky thing is that you
somehow need to embed your data which is returned by methods into the
JavaScipt functions you generate from methods.