[erlang-questions] Two beautiful programs - or web programming made easy

[Jerome Martin]

Thanks for sharing, this is nice indeed :-)
Now if we can do this without XULRunner but in a plain browser, like you
said without proprietary plugins, it would be fantastic!

2011/2/14 Edmond Begumisa <ebegumisa@REDACTED>

> Please have a look at this songbird screenshot...
>
> http://cdn.freedownloadaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/Songbird.png
>
> Songbird is a winamp-like media player. It's a XULRunner application so the
> UI you see there is just mark-up + css + js
>
> Frédéric: you can thus get a graphic designer to do the cosmetics without
> him/her needing to learn to program.
>
> Jerome: Notice the very application specific back/forward/refresh buttons
> there - in context it's much more useful than a generic browser
> back/forward/refresh. Also, the textbox where it says "Library", if you put
> your mouse there you get an application specific URI scheme that you can
> copy and paste somewhere else. The URI path takes you an item on tree on the
> left. Notice also the application-specific bookmarks.
>
> This is currently my preferred way of delivering heavily interactive
> "internet applications" (even business applications) -- via a specialised
> runtime on the client end and Erlang on the server end. Joe's code gives me
> hope that I can finally start using the browser as a client for this instead
> without flash or plugins :)
>
> - Edmond -
>
>
> On Mon, 14 Feb 2011 08:52:07 +1100, Jerome Martin <
> jxm@REDACTED> wrote:
>
>  Just on the back-button, not the history problem in general:
>>
>> 2011/2/13 Edmond Begumisa <ebegumisa@REDACTED>
>>
>>  [...]
>>>
>>> However, I've written XULRunner apps with no back buttons -- no need for
>>> them with easy-to-navigate UIs. Most Adobe AIR apps I've seen have no
>>> browser history. It's made me question: How badly do end-users really
>>> need
>>> those things?
>>>
>>
>>
>> I think users are _hooked_ to back-button, the same way most of us are
>> hooked to undo. I find those two to be essentially the same, in terms of
>> behavioral semantics. However, maybe the question here is whether or not
>> the
>> history + back button functionalities being generic and implemented at the
>> browser level is a good thing, or if it is too restrictive. Clearly, "the
>> web" has evolved, and still haven't swallowed the "web application" pill
>> completely. Maybe a standard way to delegate 'undo/back' to the web
>> application, could be useful, like a meta HTTP tag containing the URL to
>> point at in case of the user using back/undo. But then I am not sure
>> anymore
>> that HTTP/HTML is the proper foundation for this... An then suddenly I
>> realize that this is too obvious an idea not to be thought by people
>> smarter
>> than me, so I just looked up HTML5 on w3c site and voila:
>> window.history.back() and window.history.forward() provide programmatic
>> interfaces to browser back and forward functions in HTML5. See this
>> page<http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/history.html#the-history-interface>,
>> that one <http://html5demos.com/history> and maybe even this
>> one<http://www.adequatelygood.com/2010/7/Saner-HTML5-History-Management>
>> .
>>
>>
>>  If they do, couldn't we give them better application-specific versions
>>> inside our web-app UI?
>>>
>>
>>
>> Asked myself that very question 2 minutes ago, and it seems HTML5 has the
>> answer for us :-)
>>
>> So I would say that Joe's code could very much be well integrated in all
>> HTML5-supporting browser, granted that the appropriate hooks are set on
>> the
>> javascript side, and some standard logic hanging on those hooks on the
>> erlang side (gen_html5app anyone ?).
>>
>> Thoughts ?
>>
>
>
> --
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>



-- 
Jérôme Martin