[Seaside] Sending messages to javascript objects

[Andres Fortier]

Hi list,
           from the examples I've seen so far, the 
basic mechanism to update (a part of) a page is to 
split the page rendering in many #renderXYZOn: and then 
using an updater to refresh a specific part of the page 
by calling the appropriate #renderXYZOn:.

Now, even though possible, in some cases it is a waste 
of user time and bandwidth to re-render a whole 
component, when that can be done by just sending a 
javascript message. To be concrete, suppose I have a 
page with a google map component and a checkbox to 
decide whether the map should show the google bar or 
not. Using the first approach, the page would look like:

html checkbox
		value: self map isGoogleBarEnabled;
		onChange: (html updater
						id: self map containerId;
						callback: [:renderer |
										self map toggleGoogleBar.
										renderer render: self map]).

however, this means that toggling a checkbox would 
reload the whole map, which is definitely perceived by 
the user and expensive in terms of network bandwidth. 
Now, in terms of javascript this can be achieved by 
just sending the message enable/disableGoogleBar() to 
the map object, which can be coded as:

html checkbox
		id: 'choice_chk';
		value: self map isGoogleBarEnabled;
		onChange: ('if 
(document.getElementById(''choice_chk'').checked)
							{' , self map id , '.enableGoogleBar();}
							else {' , self map id , '.disableGoogleBar();}').

However, this approach means that:
1. The map model living in the Smalltalk image (i.e. 
"self map") is not synchronized with the map in the 
page, since it didn't receive the toggle notification.
2. The script is "static" in terms that it can't take 
decisions in terms of the current state of the St 
image. It can just code the app state in the script at 
the time the page was rendered, something that may not 
be consistent over time.
3. Even though a definitely minor issue, I have to 
write javascript.

To solve the first problem the first thing that comes 
to my mind is replicating the effort, by also attaching 
a callback that updates the model, which I'm not very 
fond of.  The second one seems a bit more weird, since 
I would need to coordinate St objects with javascript 
objects. So I was wondering if there already is a 
standard mechanism to handle this kind of situations. I 
started thinking about a seamless way of interacting 
with javascript objects from  Smalltalk by some sort of 
proxies, but I don't want to put up a new machinery if 
there this has already been solved.

Thanks in advance,
       			        Andrés