Keith Hodges wrote:
> Dear Squeakers and Tweakers,
>
> I have been charged with building a website for a creative arts group,
> and I have to say I am fed up with the web, web2.0, AJAX, even Seaside
> (sorry avi) and all the rest.
>
> Its a long story I have been coding javascript in a little gizmo called
> TiddlyWiki for a year or so to try and do something a little clever with
> Web Browsers as a client, to be honest its hard work. This week I was
> looking at Laszlo a fairly cool tool (though on the same day I found a
> book about Laszlo son of Dracula which didn't bode well). In Laszlo you
> throw together an XML file which reflects the structure of your UI, the
> sort of thing you would do with a drag and drop GUI builder 15 years
> ago, sprinkled with some javascript for defining behaviours, and pop
> your data into a second XML file. This text file collection is requested
> by your browser which (when developing) hits a Java Tomcat serverlet
> which churns compilers for a minute or so to produce a swf file that
> will run on a flash plugin (but it doesnt bother to use any features of
> flash it just wants the renderer and vm). Within 1 day I find that
> Laszlo cant tile a graphic as a background and I hunt around and find it
> has a draw canvas that implements part of the Web Hypertext Application
> Technology Working Group spec for drawing. I looked at this spec and the
> future of the humble browser looks ominous, complicated is not the word
> for it. In this whole venture all I am thinking is What a mess!
>
> Then I found Tweak, and loaded a squeak image - as you do - and lo, we
> launch pretty quickly dont we, compare that with mozilla or acrobat and
> I am on a 500Mhz box remember the old days?
>
> All I want is to draw a picture, display some text, and share it with my
> friends. It would be nice if that text was familiar to my friends and
> you could click on things the way they are used to, but thats all I am
> asking for. A bit of user interactivity might be nice.
>
> So... what would it take to simply take squeak and present it in such a
> way as to be familiar to the average web browser user. Take a look a
> Tweak, Large fonts and we are almost there, some form of text layout
> engine, have text with inlined images and widgets. We are so close to
> having something useable but we never quite make it.
>
> thoughts anyone?
have you thought about the Squeakland plugin and starting there?