GUIs - ruby on rails, rico

[Joe Armstrong (AL/EAB)]

It's even better than I thought. The Canvas widget *is* in 
Firefox 1.5 beta 1 and runs out of the box!!!

Strangely there are very few working examples on the net to show how the
canvas is used.

This is amazing - up to now it has been difficult to direct display vector graphics
on the web - with the canvas widget this is easy. 

Wow

/Joe




> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-erlang-questions@REDACTED
> [mailto:owner-erlang-questions@REDACTED]On Behalf Of Joe Armstrong
> (AL/EAB)
> Sent: den 19 september 2005 11:22
> To: erlang-questions
> Subject: GUIs - ruby on rails, rico
> 
> 
> 
> It seems like my quest for a GUI is almost over.
> 
> Klacke had pointed me at XMLHTTP but I just didn't get it (dumbo) -
> 
> Then I hacked a bit and - WOW. Firstly XMLHTTP is nothing 
> about XML - it's just allows
> a light weight RPC to made from within a web page. So you 
> connect a bit
> of JavaScript to an event - this JavaScript RPCs a server, 
> the server replies with
> a string that the JavaScript interprets (any old string - not 
> necessarily XML)
> and the JavaScript modifies the web page.
> 
> The last bit (the JavaScript modifies the web page) is the 
> tricky bit - to
> do this you need to use the DOM - which is (uuugh) painful.
> 
> Fortunately there are libraries to do this - ruby on rails 
> uses prototype.js to do this
> http://prototype.conio.net/ And Tobbe has written a library 
> (jungerl/lib/js) to take to prototype.js
> 
> Also of interest is rico http://openrico.org/rico/home.page 
> (especially their innerHTML
> demo) (see 
> http://openrico.org/rico/demos.page?demo=ricoAjaxInnerHTML.html)
> 
> As far as I can see one could make a pretty snazzy GUI in a 
> web brower with
> 
> 	- a local HTTP server (yaws)
> 	- XMLHTTP and
> 	- rico or prototype.js
> 
> Also in the pipeline is an HTML extension <canvas> which has 
> made it to 
> safari and mozilla - this is looking good.
> 
> What would be even nicer would be a port of the konfabulator to linux
> http://www.konfabulator.com/ - since this (I think) would 
> solve all my GUI problems.
> 
> This technology is about to explode - so yaws should be well placed - 
> this means that servers are going to be handling a lot of 
> lightweight RPCs
> 
> So go hack
> 
> /Joe
> 
>