[squeak-dev] [ANN] SeasideXUL

Pavel Krivanek squeak1 at continentalbrno.cz
Sun Apr 13 21:22:28 UTC 2008


Hi all,

I started the project named SeasideXUL. This package enables to
generate XUL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XUL) code in Seaside 2.9 so
now we can create applications with standard look&feel directly in
Smalltalk with the power of Seaside.

Pictures are worth more than thousand words:
http://comtalk.eu/public/pub/SeasideXUL/screenshots/

XUL can be displayed directly in FireFox or there's a project named
XULRunner that enables to run it as a standalone application (see
screenshots, the application then can use own shortcuts etc.) but
still in thin-client/server architecture. Standard HTML or SVG code
can be embedded in XUL page.

I had to created ajax-based call/answer mechanism with continuations
for SeasideXUL. The complete port of XUL Periodic Table
(http://www.hevanet.com/acorbin/xul/top.xul) is included as the
demonstration application. However lot of next things wait for
implementation (e.g. some alternative to forms) or need to be made
more robust and easily usable (whole ajax part).

Seaside 2.9 is quite hard to load and SeasideXUL doesn't reflect some
latest changes in this package (Seaside 2.9 is still under heavy
development) so if you want to try SeasideXUL on your own in this
stage of development, do not await a nice walk through a rosarium. It
was developed on this set of packages:

Scriptaculous-Components (Scriptaculous-Components-lr.41)
Scriptaculous-Core (Scriptaculous-Core-lr.18)
Scriptaculous-Squeak-Core (Scriptaculous-Squeak-Core-lr.1)
Scriptaculous-Tests (Scriptaculous-Tests-lr.21)
Seaside-Adapters-Core (Seaside-Adapters-Core-pmm.3)
Seaside-Core (Seaside-Core-lr.120)
Seaside-Development-Core (Seaside-Development-Core-lr.20)
Seaside-Examples (Seaside-Examples-pmm.1)
Seaside-Squeak-Adapters (Seaside-Squeak-Adapters-mu.7)
Seaside-Squeak-Core (Seaside-Squeak-Core-dkh.38)
Seaside-Squeak-Development (Seaside-Squeak-Development-pmm.10)
Seaside-Squeak-Kom (Seaside-Squeak-Kom-pmm.13)
Seaside-Tests (Seaside-Tests-dkh.102)
Seaside-Utils-Core (Seaside-Utils-Core-lr.7)

Scriptaculous dependency should be removed in next versions.

Mozilla seems to be pretty strong platform provider and future
versions of FireFox should be based directly on the XULRunner. I hope
that we did the important step to gain multi-platform and
multi-implementation user interface framework for Smalltalk.

Cheers,
-- Pavel



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