i'm here to ask a general question about Extjs or any other web related technologies....
i found out that it is impossible to parse xml without the help of any webservice.....
so i would like to know about the pro's and cons about these kind of technologies specifically sencha.
whats the best feature you find intresting about this technology and also the worst thing...
ExtJS, SmartClient, YUI, MooTools, etc are all rich Internet application (RIA) frameworks that allow you to integrate at the JavaScript and/or Google Web Toolkit levels. I have generally seen ExtJS and SmartClient compared most frequently. I have used SmartClient myself and one reason I did was because of the licensing differences between the two.
The biggest advantage of something like ExtJS or SmartClient is that they allow you to focus on building a data-driven service that easily integrates with their rich set of widgets. This allows you to focus on your data and simply leverage their flexible, cross browser-ish, slick looking web GUI controls.
In my opinion, it's a great time saver and browser robustness advantage. You can combine these with things like JQuery, etc. In fact, you can use ExtJS and SmartClient together if you like. (although most people won't)
There's a data package in ExtJS & Sencha Touch that allows you to easily bind client apps to JSON, YQL, XML datasources.
You should probably take a look at the documentation for the data.* part of the ExtJS library: http://dev.sencha.com/deploy/dev/docs/?class=Ext.data.XmlStore and this area is further improving in the forthcoming EXT JS 4
Related
Are there any advantage of using TVML over custom App (media based App not a game) for Apple TVOS? From what I read from Apple's documentation I could not figure out any such advantage (though it mostly talks about TVML/TVJs).
For iOS (Swift, Objective C) developers, using custom seems like easier, faster and with more possibilities.
I think whatever templates are provided by Apple can be build using UIKit because internally it is UIKit. Right?
[Update]
Let me rephrase my original question as the answers so far are not given any points in favour of custom App. I agree that #shirefriendship has some real valid points in favour of TVML (biggest one is- > App changes possible w/o an App update). Are there any advantages of using custom over TVML? Like anything not in reach of TVML?
Having already built an application using TVML/JS and now working on a native application I would say that the Javascript option is aimed more towards beginners or basic applications.
TVML applications provide an easier, faster way to build standard applications with common features/user interface. We used it to rapidly build a prototype of an application. Now that we've launched the application and it's getting some uplift (featured in What to Watch and Top Free Apps UK) we are now rebuilding it natively to add additional features such as analytics, crash reporting, custom interfaces and other bits to increase re-circulation and custom recommendations.
#shirefriendship's answer provides a good explanation to the benefits of TVML applications and I think this is a good option for beginners, prototype applications or even basic applications.
Native applications provide alot more control over how the application looks, works and feels. Having access to most of the iOS SDK's allows you to do more such as integrating Cloudkit, develop 2D & 3D games and more.
Once we have finished development of our native TV application I'll update the answer with some more information such as development time between the two different versions, features in the application etc.
UPDATE: To answer your second question, yes you can pretty much develop ANY user interface / template using UIKit, the TVML templates provide user interfaces that would be commonly used / quite handy. Using UIKit you could replicate or customize any of the pre-defined templates or build something completely new.
It is true that you have more flexibility with custom UIKit code. With enough time, you could potentially create an app that behaves similarly to a TVML/TVJS app...but why reinvent the wheel?
There are certain advantages to using TVML Templates, even if you are primarily a Swift/Obj-C developer.
TVML templates provide a familiar experience for the user. Have you
ever used the Netflix TV app, or HBO GO, or iTunes? They all use
TVML Templates and have a distinct look and feel to them. This cuts down drastically on design time.
Templates are incredibly easy to implement, even with very little
JavaScript experience. Auto-layout is taken care of for you. Lazy
loading images occurs automatically. The behavior of every UI
element on the screen has already been taken care of by Apple.
The templates are structured yet customizable. Templates are plug
and play, but you can still customize certain aspects of the UI
elements Styles and Attributes
You can host your TVML/TVJS files on a web server. This allows you
to make changes to your app without your user needing to download an
update to your app.
You can mix and match TVML with custom UIKit. Want Custom behavior with UIKit sometimes, but for standard views, you'd prefer a template? Why choose? You can have BOTH in the same app. Check out my answer here that describes how: How To Mix UIKit and TVML Within One App
When in doubt, try it out! Mess around with the Catalog App from Apple and see if you like TVML templates. You might surprise yourself.
MSK
The primary advantage of TVML is that it is all javascript which appeals to a broader base of developers.
Not sure about your second question regarding developing templates via UIKit
What is the better framework for development Windows Store application?
I have used http://metroprism.codeplex.com/ but now I want to use Caliburn.Micro or MVVM light for another project.
I have looked through several application examples for these frameworks but they were not complicated enough for me to estimate usage in bigger projects.
These two ones are completely documented but the problem I think is that documentation for winrt mixed with WP7, Silverlight and WPF and I doubt a bit in supporting all features and practices of using exactly for Windows Store application.
Could you give me advice what is the better one? Or what are the good practices in development for Winrt with modularity supporting like in Prism for WPF and Silverlight.
Thanks.
MVVM Light and Caliburn.Micro basically do the same thing but they do it using opposing "philosophies of development" in MVVM.
MVVM Light is a "view first" approach. In this approach the ViewModel is instantiated in by the View. In MVVM Light this is done via something called the ViewModelLocator, a static class that binds a public property directly to the DataContext of the View.
Caliburn.Micro is a "viewmodel first" approach. Here you find that the viewmodel and view are created by an IOC mechanism that binds the two together. You navigate from viewmodel to viewmodel, with the views being generated in response to the navigation to a ViewModel.
They both have different features:
MVVM Light has a really nice messaging system for allowing view models to communicate with each other in a loosely-coupled way.
MVVM Light has a really simple mechanism for injecting design-time data into your views. Basically it swaps out your runtime services with design-time services that feed data to your viewmodels and, in turn your view. This makes design time data really easy to use.
Caliburn.Micro has an amazing data-binding setup, where it handles most of your databinding scaffolding for you. Basically, it maps the names of methods and properties to the names of controls in the view and autowires them. This saves lots of code and is a really, really nice feature.
Caliburn.Micro uses a "Convention over Configuration" mechanism to map views to viewmodels. MainView maps to MainViewModel, etc. This means you've got no configuration, you just need to make sure that you've got your naming conventions sorted out.
I've used both frameworks (Caliburn.Micro for WP7 and MVVM Light for Windows 8 Store Apps) and like them both for different reasons. MVVM Light is easier to start using but Caliburn.Micro is probably more powerful. I've found them both more than adequate for writing moderately complex applications quickly.
Caliburn.Micro gives you clean XAML at the cost of some magic. MVVM Light is a clean and simple framework that is easy to understand and works well. Prism seems to be a bit heavier than MVVM Light and more business app oriented - it does more than just MVVM. There are many things to consider. Choosing what you already know will let you focus on adding features, but learning a new framework can certainly be a good learning experience helpful in future choices - so you could pick something you haven't used before if you want to learn. You could also write your own framework and only include what you need. I usually go somewhere between roll your own and MVVM Light because that is what I know, though if I were to build a bigger enterprise app - Prism might be better suited for the task. I haven't used Caliburn.Micro because the novelty of different MVVM approaches wore off for me and I just want to create apps. With WinRT a roll-your-own-framework approach is easier than with any platform before because the basic project templates already give you some foundations as I wrote in my Minimalistic MVVM blog post. I would recommend that approach if you already tried MVVM and want to use only the pieces you need - the framework will grow with your app. You can just grab pieces of code from other frameworks if you need them or write your own implementations of the patterns you need.
To summarize
If you want to learn - try something you haven't tried before or write your own framework
If you want to create an app quickly and it is not a huge app - use what you know or go minimalistic and don't use anything but what you get from the templates
If you are building a big app with lots of features - consider Prism or rather first think whether Windows Store is the right target platform for you since it seems to be focusing more on simple in and out tablet apps
Just looking at Haskell and web frameworks and wondering if it would make sense to use Haskell's great threading/event functionality to power a platform for writing HTML5 and REST apps that expose an HTTP API for data and a WebSocket (with maybe SockJS support for appropriate fallback) API for events? It doesn't seem like the "big" web frameworks support WebSockets as a first-class citizen, though they seem to have a lot of other things going for them.
My concern is making use of available cores, which Haskell can do well, but also providing easy user integration on the server side for validation and server-side logic (maybe by embedding Lua or similar?). If one wrote this on the JVM, one could make use of multiple server-side language support and lots of libraries for this sort of thing.
I'm sure people are doing things like this in a one-off solution for their own applications but I'm thinking along the lines of a PaaS-type approach where one can write HTML5 apps with data (including proper synchronization for offline use) and eventing "for free" as a fundamental part of the platform. Most logic would reside in the browser but some could be run on the server with the appropriate hooks and a reasonable embeddability (JavaScript seems out of the question and not sure about embedding interpreters in Haskell as I'm only dangerously familiar with Haskell in general).
Part of the problem I've had with Haskell so far is that I'm not a Math guy. I didn't study CS in college and I'm a creative-type thinker. So a lot of the tutorials and documentation get me pretty lost, especially when dealing with the mathematical stuff.
Has anyone trod this path already? Am I late to the party? :)
Gregory Collins gave a tutorial at CUFP last year about using Snap to build an interactive chat website using long polling (not websockets). The source code is here.
In the websockets department, Jasper Van der Jeugt wrote a Haskell websockets library. It is available on hackage and comes with websockets-snap, which provides Snap framework support. There's also wai-websockets which provides integration with Warp.
I believe all of the major frameworks have some level of websockets support, so they should all be a fair choice based on your requirements. For Yesod, there's an example of creating a chat system (using eventsource, not websockets) available in the book:
http://www.yesodweb.com/book/wiki-chat-example
I don't like django. The forms, the url schemes, the way they assume everyone use models on schemaful db (I prefer to use mongodb because it's so clean and easy).
I am pretty much fluent in all the major languages. I do prefer python because it's very clean but also strict (aka function signatures requires you to pass in only X variables etc).
I want something developed and mature - this means that stuff like authentication, registration etc should all be developed and ready to use.
Any suggestions?
TLDR: Need new web dev framework. Requirement: Nothing. Preference: Mongodb, python.
By the way forgot to mention that I might be looking for employment in the web dev industry. So if you can recommend something that is common among big companies that would also be a bonus. like scala's lift for foursquare (if I am not wrong) and php for facebook.
Rails. It works with MongoDB via Mongoid and has many authentication solutions. You'll find Ruby very comfortable if you have Python experience.
I'm using Flask for Python, and I love it. I'm using SQLAlchemy for Postgre, but it's super minimalistic, so you can use it with whatever you'd like. I've also heard really good things about Pylons, but don't have any experience with it myself.
Spring Framework. (Java)
For authentication you can use Spring Security
It seems like you aren't very keen on using Java, but if you don't mind a different language on the JVM I'd suggest taking a look at Compojure, a web framework for Clojure. It isn't a scripting language but can offer close to the same development speeds once you get used to 'the-lisp-way' of doing things.
I'm unaware of a fully featured MongoDB interface specifically for Clojure, but CongoMongo and Adia (I can't include more than the one link currently so you'll need to google them yourself, sorry!) might have (atleast part of) what you're looking for. If nothing else, you could probably just use an existing Java library to access MongoDB or use a different database. Give Compojure a try though, its definitely productive!
Also on a completely unrelated note, this happens to be my first answer on SO, so please be gentle with the downvotes :)
Pylons.
It will be very fitting for you
Im a big believer in grails. Built on best of breed technologies like Spring and Hibernate, you can fall back to java if you have too. Takes all the pain out of more traditional Java EE development. Has all the important functionality as plugins, you have access to Spring Security, JMS, everything you need. Is very convenient as the back end to a RIA, easily render you models as json, easily handle xml. Its great.
EDIT -- to address the comment, Grails uses the Groovy language, which is scriptable and has some very groovy features. And it is easy to learn if you are familiar with java. Has closures, lots of syntactic sugar.
The scripting part is actually quite invaluable -- you write groovy scripts and import your grails classes to whip up functionality to augment your app (like quick queries into your db)
I want to develop a delphi application with an HTML/CSS graphical user interface, not necessarily running from within a web browser. I want to do this do create a richer graphical user interface with animations etc. and break away from normal VCL components / Windows look. Any suggestions?
HTML and CSS won't deliver animations or a Rich User Interface to your feet. Far from it in fact. Quite the opposite. You will need to invest in a toolkit to provide that sort of functionality and almost certainly involve JavaScript. And even if you don't want your eventual application hosted in a web browser, your application will itself have to host a web browser to render your HTML/CSS/JavaScript UI, and you will then have a much more difficult job of connecting your GUI to your application logic (unless you do actually embrace a web application architecture).
Delphi (or any Windows application development language for that matter) gets you much, much further down the road towards a more simply, effectively and quickly implemented Rich User Interface than HTML or CSS.
If you don't like the look and feel of the standard Delphi controls (which in essence is what you are saying) there are numerous alternative libraries available.
Also bear in mind however that when someone uses a Windows application they expect it to look and behave a certain way to a large extent. Using fancy, web based paradigm's in a desktop application simply for the sake of it is likely to confuse and frustrate users if taken too far.
I'm all for user interfaces breaking with convention where it leads to a more intuitive user interface, but simply being "prettier" does not necessarily lead in that direction and is just as misguided as dogmatically adhering to convention.
In one of my applications I have an an embedded browser and I have implemented the IDocHostUIHandler interface. This allows me to expose a COM object via the "GetExternal" method. I simply have a COM object that exposes methods and properties of my application which makes them available to the web pages hosted inside the embedded browser.
So the script in my web pages has lines like "external.DoSomething()" and "i=external.GetThisValue()". So, for example, behind button onclick events you can run a method of your application (implement in the main form, in the COM object itself, or whatever you like).
This site has lots of info on embedding a browser in your Delphi app:
http://www.delphidabbler.com/articles?article=22
It can certainly be cumbersome to implement a lot of this stuff and in many cases there are probably better options. But for my specific purpose I am able to offer a "home page" which can easily be modified to change its layout, look and even expose more (or less) functionality as required by myself or my users.
If you want a Delphi program with a better-looking interface, HTML is really not what you're looking for. What you really need are better-looking VCL controls.
Take a look at TMS Smooth Controls, for example. If you're on Delphi 2009 or 2010, you can get it as a free download here. That's one of many component libraries that can bring a slicker user interface to your program.
HTML / CSS offers some nice features which are (not yet?) available in Delphi and the VCL. They are also a good starting point for client/server programming, separating the user interface and the business logic is a key factor here.
One popular library for Delphi is the extpascal project:
ExtPascal is an Object Pascal (Delphi,
FreePascal/Lazarus) wrapper/binding
for Ext JS, a complete GUI Ajax
framework, made in JavaScript, for
Rich Internet Application (RIA)
development. ExtPascal lets you use
Ext JS from Object Pascal commands
issued by the server. It brings the
structure and strict syntax of the
Object Pascal for programming the web
browser. ExtPascal will wrap Draw2d
into future releases.
Some demos are online here and here.
p.s. and I really like the HTML / CSS support for element and font sizes in relative units (for exampe percent). Combined with browser zoom in / zoom out and WCAG, user interface ergonomy can not be much better.
HTML Option 1
If you relly want to use HTML+CSS(+JavaScript) to build a GUI, you can have a look at HTML Applications, a very fascinating concept from Microsoft. HTML Applications, .hta files, have been supported from Windows ME, if I remember correctly, and they are still supported on Windows 7.
You could create an HTML Application (i.e. an HTA file), and by so doing, creating a GUI using only HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. When the user double-clicks the HTA file, it will open like a program, but the GUI is entirely based on HTML; in fact, the entire Window is an Internet Explorer window in disguise.
And now comes the important part: you could create non-GUI Delphi applications (i.e., Delphi applications that are not console applications, but that have no forms either), and start them via hyperlinks (or JavaScript) from within your HTA GUI. (Well, it is probably better to create one such Delphi application, and use command-line arguments (ParamStrs) to communicate the desired action.)
Just an idea...
HTML Option 2
Alternatively, you could create a normal Delphi GUI application, but fill the entire main form with a TWebBrowser (a IE control), using Align := alClient. Then you could either load static HTML pages (stored in the Program Files folder or on the Internet), or you could use Delphi to dynamically create HTML pages to show. I think it is possible to intercept links from the control, so that you could respond to links using Delphi code.
What about OpenGL?
If you want to "break away" from the normal Windows look and feel, then I would recommend you to create your GUI using OpenGL. It is very easy to make a Delphi application with OpenGL (as long as you are familiar with OpenGL) - just add "OpenGL" to your uses list.
First this: I completely agree with Deltics' answer.
Having said that, if you master HTML and CSS (and JavaScript and AJAX etc etc) and you are looking for a way to use the power and speed of the Delphi compiler to run the dynamics of a website, this may be of interest.
I've created a project that uses the Delphi compiler to build a library that runs a website. The source-files combines HTML and Delphi, much like other web-scripting tools out there, but gets processed on a page-refresh, and compiled automatically. It uses a 'library handler' that plugs in the website library into pretty much anything you like: IIS, Apache, a stand-alone HTTP server (for hosting), or directly into InternetExplorer or FireFox (which is great for developing).
http://xxm.sourceforge.net/
New versions of Qt contain ability to use html/js for interfaces. I don't know if there is Qt library bindings for Delphi, but Qt is exactly what you want.
for Rich GUI and animation, have you looked at KSDev DXScen and VGScene ?
If you want to keep your delphi/Pascal Object 'background' and have a Web like RIA you also have a look to Morfik : link text