[Gambas-user] Gambas as language for web development

[Benoit Minisini]

On mercredi 14 mai 2008, José Luis Redrejo wrote:
> Appart from having CGI, would not be great being able to use the ide to
> build applications for gtk, qt or xul (like this example:
> http://www.hevanet.com/acorbin/xul/top.xul) ?
>

I don't know xul well. Anyway, at the moment, I am totally against using it 
for the following reasons:

* Developing "local" applications: it can be run only inside Mozilla/Firefox 
and so on. It is not like Qt or GTK+ that are shared libraries that you can 
use in any program.

* Developing "network" applications: you have to use Mozilla/Firefox as client 
browser.

As if Mozilla/XUL becomes the OS... Herk. And it is so slow...

But I may be wrong. Apparently there is a XULRunner that allows to run 
applications outside of Mozilla.

Anyway, what I want to achieve with Gambas is the ability to develop "web" 
applications directly from the IDE, as easily as developing GUI is.

A good point is the upcoming HTML 5: it seems to bring all the controls that 
are missing in HTML 4: treeviews, columnviews...

Another good point is the upcoming WebKit: it will allows browsers on small 
computers (PDA...) fully compliant. Try to run JavaScript on Internet 
Explorer on WindowsCE (I don't remember what his name is now).

I want to minimize the use of JavaScript as much as possible. I don't think I 
will be able to avoid it for implementing controls equivalent to what we 
already have in gb.qt/gb.gtk.

Events raised by control will be sent by JavaScript code to the server. 
Consequently we won't be able to implement "real time" events 
like "MouseMove".

Reacting to an event will need to display the page entirely again (it is an 
HTTP request followed by its answer), unless we use JavaScript and the DOM to 
update the web page. It is not necessarily a good idea, even if sophisticated 
applications like Google Docs need that.

Whatever is done, I want it to be K.I.S.S. Something that can run on the 
greater number of browsers, and that don't hide too much to the programmer.

Really, that task is big and not evident: how to make something easy without 
making a kitchen sink?

All that is fully open to talk of course. I won't make anything now, I don't 
have the time. :-)

Regards,

-- 
Benoit Minisini