[Gambas-user] Gambas as language for web development

[José Luis Redrejo]

2008/5/14 Benoit Minisini <gambas at ...1...>:

> 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.
>


That's right. At least in Debian it exists.


> 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).
>


what's the point of using webkit instead of xulrunner?
I'm not saying I prefere xul, as I don't know enough of both to compare, I'm
just saying that you could apply to webkit the same reasons you gave to be
against xul.

OTOH if you plan to support IExplorer on any platform I'm afraid you'll
never arrive anywhere, unless you use javascript that has been used in
several ajax toolkit for a long time and has the needed workaround pretty
tested and solid.


>
> 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.
>


Maybe the answer is blowing in the wind:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_%28programming%29 :



>
> 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?
>

I know of some very imaginative approach. As an example, I have a friend who
made a smalltalk-to-javascript translator, as he's a st guru but had to
develop some web apps and didn't want to leave his favourite language. Maybe
a gambas-to-javascript translator could do the magic.



>
> All that is fully open to talk of course. I won't make anything now, I
> don't
> have the time. :-)
>
>
I fully understand you. This is a very big project and maybe too ambitious,
but dreaming is free ;-)

Cheers
José L.