I cant decide between this two options.
M Project vs Sproutcore
I'm building an application that will be primary served on mobile but has to be viable on desktop.
Mproject is on the edge with number and variability of his prebuilded widgets and may happen that I will need some more or at least alter some behavior.
So this is kind of down side of Mproject. But it looked for first review that Mproject need less code for basic stuff.
And the second problem comes with the skins. I will basicaly need reskin everything a lot. The design of app has to be very unique.
So I want to know which of them is easily to reskin not just by theme-roller and similar stuff.
I would appreciate any other JavaScript-only frameworks recommendations.
Thanks for all replies.
I'm not sure what kind of application are you building so you should take care with my answer.
M-Project solved our problems fine, and help us to make it clear code ... when you understand how it works. It requires a bit of hard work, the documentation is a bit poor and is a new project where some things are not yet implemented. You can change application look modifying HTML and CSS so I think you should have no problems with this.
Also you can download their code and modify it without problems, it is easy to read and modify if you need any specific behavior.
On other side, I never used Sproutcore, it have a really nice look. But documentation say it is focused on desktop applications. Probably you will not have too much problems to adapt the output HTML for mobile devices, I guess.
Lastly, I think you can take a look on Lungo.js Framework.
Best regards.
Related
I need to create a custom GUI framework for a project. I actually created a very primitive GUI framework which has buttons, images, text etc. But it is pretty simple and I don't have any prior knowledge of designing a GUI framework. The project we are working on got a little serious and I need to do a better job. So, what books or any kind of documentation can you recommend for me?
Note: I want to create the framework probably in an object-oriented way and I will probably use C# but the documentation does not need to be in C#.
Ok, I'm far from an expert but I'll try to write some useful stuff. I don't know much about your experience, so sorry if it seems silly.
I have been working with several GUI frameworks in the past, in various languages (wxpython, gtk+, swing, . . .).
Never as an expert, but here is what I can say :
Keep it simple. If you want to design from scratch, I guess there is no need for crazy complex stuff. Try to keep it as straightforward as possible by reducing the number of inputs and options in your elements.
b. A major common point of all the successful frameworks I know is the abstraction. Each single element can be easily handled, but it still has the power of all its parents.
This allows your objects to be really versatile while simple.
Read lots of other frameworks documentation. I like spending time reading the doc of GUI framework because it helps you understand the abstraction levels. I find the pygtk doc easy to read.
Use other frameworks. Most frameworks do things more or less in the same way. This is especially true for GUI frameworks. Frame containing layouts; menubars and statusbars; I bet 95% of the concepts you want to use can be found in the other frameworks.
In this way, the best way to know how to develop it is to know what you need and how to do it.
Whenever I work on a GUI, I start reading the corresponding series of articles here .
The writer does a great job explaining everything in a simple way, so that you can get along fast with the concepts.
Keep it open. Something I see more and more often is the use of high level syntax for describing GUIS. GTk for example can take XML files in input and create a whole interface out of it. I find it very nice for abstraction, and reuse. And I also greatly reduce the amount of code needed.
I couldn't really find books on the precise subject you want. I think you already searched on the web also.
I hope those small ideas will help you.
I am looking for a reporting and database contols solution. This post is not a rate the control but what has your experience been when using it.
I had a look at Telerik, DevExpress, Syncfusion and a few others. I have downloaded a copy of each and tested each for a week or so. However these arent cheap when I make the investment I would like to base it on othera experience as well as my own feel for the tools.
I had read all the post on SO and many other sites. Many outdated so wanted to know more recent experiences.
DevExpress looks great and seems to be what im lookig for however from what ive read their controls are coded and very differet ways. WPF is apparently very bad. I could be wrong though and please correct if i habe been misinformed.
Everyone seem to be happy with Telerik.
I will probably be customising later on so source is important. Winforms will be used. But would like to migrate to WPF and/or ASP.Net later. This is client requirements.
thanks in advance
You should list down your expectations from a third party suit.
Also its better to compare individual components rather than the whole suit.
I have lot of experience with devexpress#winforms, but the learning curve is quite steep.
I don't like the layout controls. Rest of the controls are pretty slick. Reports and Charts are good.
Support is also quite good.
I'm working with DevExpress scheduler for WinForms right now, and I can say only praises for this component suite. Everything is accessible easily, customizations are very easy; but to be honest I still haven't done any major customization, so it could be possible that 95% cases are easy, but that 5% is impossible (not sure, don't have that much experience with DevExpress). I would just say that they are much better than Infragistics WinForms suite.
Also reporting suite (XtraReports) is well known as a very good solution.
Background
I'm at the planning stages of a DIY project that'll help me automate some hardware at my house. It's probably also worthwhile to mention that I've got almost no experience with web-related development.
The Basics
http://img7.imageshack.us/img7/4706/drawingo.png -- I can't seem to embed the diagram.
In order to simplify management, I want to implement my UI in the browser.
The meat of my application will reside inside a Windows service or Linux daemon; this does not mean, however, that I'm after a cross-platform solution -- I'm not tied to any particular platform, so I'll pick one (probably based on the responses that I get) and stick with it.
I would prefer to use "free" tools (e.g., LAMP/WAMP), but it's not a deal breaker.
It would be nice to be able to communicate back to the user that some action is in progress (I think AJAX would be one way to go?)
Questions
The only thing that's not entirely clear to me is the implementation of step № 3. I'd like to hear possible implementation ideas (on Windows or Linux) as to how this should be done. Hopefully some of you can share how this sort of thing is done in the real world.
Miscellaneous
As always, if there's a problem with my thinking, please point it out!
There are many people better qualified to help with step 3 so I'll leave that to them.
My question is whether is you are looking forward to learning the mess of web technologies required for the front end or consider it a necessary evil on the way to what you really want to accomplish? If the latter (and assuming you are working in C/C++) consider taking a look at WT. It's a toolkit that makes the developing the web interface seem more like a desktop gui while handling much of the ugliness for you. It could potentially cut a lot of time off your development.
Right now I'm not sure...
I'd say yes. I'm using it. I know for a fact that Universal are using it on some of their (thousands of) sites. I will add some caveats, however:
There are serious problems with setting it up, especially if you want to debug into the libraries.
The helper functions favour prototype, as opposed to the more modern jQuery. This is changing rapidly, however.
The documentation is a bit chaotic, again the Castle Team are working on that.
I'm not guaranteeing every last "out-there" feature works, but the point of the system is actually to keep it simple.
Compared to vanilla ASP.NET, it's an absolute joy. I assure you that you won't miss viewstate.
We have been building a fairly large application with it for the past year and a half. Its been nice not to have to deal with the old ASP/Page based model and use the better Model/View/Controller design pattern.
To get the new stuff you really need to work off the trunk of development because they don't do releases very often. We have a lot of tests that get the framework involved so when an update in the framework breaks something we depend on we know about it immediately.
If you have to work in .NET this beats the heck out of the alternatives.
There is an overview on the monorail forum: http://forum.castleproject.org/viewforum.php?f=6
I'm using it for an application and haven't had any big issues with it.
The biggest problem is indeed find good documentation and examples.
I've had no problems setting it up. Julian, I don't think it is constructive to say things like "serious problems" without any further clarification or example.
Debugging into the libraries is trivial. Because it's open source, you can debug into the whole thing.
I've been using MonoRail for production for ages on many projects, as an employee, as an indie contractor, and for non-work related sites.
I know I'm biased on that, however I can whole heartedly promise that my positive usage experience is what lured me into contributing to the project, not the other way around.
What real-world projects would you suggest looking through the sources?
As I'm learning Java Swing, mucommander seems to be a decent example. The code is excessively commented though.
EDIT: No shameless plugs plz :).
I learned a lot from looking at the source code to GoGrinder. It's well thought out, uses MVC correctly, and the comments are helpful (and no, I didn't write it). It's also a fun program to use if you want to learn how to play Go.
For Gui design, Patterns and general good advice I highly reccomend Jeremey Miller's series of articles on building a better CAB. For C#, but equally applicable to Java. Also using
the MVC style which Stackoverflow follows, and Apple uses for Interface Builder.
Build your own CAB
Jeremy's articles/ideas are followed in his own project, which you can download and inspect at http://storyteller.tigris.org/
Take a look at the Windows version of truecrypt. It is one of the best organized open source projects I've ever seen. You can almost tell how the whole thing works just from the directory and file layout.
What I've done to learn some new technologies over the years is to look to open source projects that both match the criteria you're looking for and also interest you.
I'm not a Swing guy, but I'd suggest finding a project that uses Java Swing, does not appear too complicated, and then start digging through the source. The nice thing is you can then see the app before you start poking through it, and then you can see what happens as you change stuff.
The idea behind picking something that interests you is that it will keep you engaged. I am intrigued by content management systems, so I might download a CMS that I can then see how stuff works, and I'm engaged because the problem domain of the project fits in with an interest.
I've done this once or twice when I had to get up to speed on C# and I think it works will. YMMV....
Some of the most well thought out source code ( c++ ) I have seen in an open source project is the Ogre3D graphics engine, I've learned a lot about OOA&D just by looking at the structure and reading the comments. It is also well maintained and the community is very active.. http://ogre3d.org