overthinkings

Property Binding

Ruben — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 17:49:10 +0000

fig 1. Property Bindings.

With property binding you can define the way a property is calculated. This statement is usually based on a javascript expression including one or more properties on other objects. The value of the property will always be kept up to date. This means that when one of the dependent properties changes, the property is recalculated. See fig 1. for a graphical explanation.

Let me give you an example to make it a bit straightforward. This example sets the visibility of the slider based on the state of the checkbox.
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MVC and Javeline PlatForm

Ruben — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 10:29:44 +0000

fig 1. Model-view-controller.

I’m not someone that knows the intricate details of design patterns. Whilst trying to tell people how Javeline PlatForm works I’ve often used the MVC design pattern to describe the functions. It’s even in the JumpStart Guide. In writing this article I talked to Arnold Daniels, who friendly explained to me that I was completely wrong. He simply explained to me the basics of MVC, which instantly made it clear to me why it’s nearly impossible, if not impracticle to apply this design pattern to widget based GUI systems. (more…)

Presentation @JTeam, Amsterdam

Ruben — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:54:31 +0000

We had a nice presentation at JTeam’s Tech Meeting today. It wasn’t recorded on video, but I do want to share the slides, and the demo’s. JTeam is a Java oriented company that works a lot with the Spring Framework. They have quite some experience with GWT. For us a challenge to show them the benefits of Javeline PlatForm (JPF). We tried to show in particular how JPF can be used in a real production application.
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What is Javeline PlatForm, and how does it compare?

Ruben — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 23:34:47 +0000

It has been buzzing around the community lately. A great deal of attention has come my way as well. Today I received an interesting question from Yuvaraj Thiagarajan. He wants to know what Javeline PlatForm is exactly, and how it relates to other frameworks. Rather than answering it in the comments, I wanted to give a thorough answer in this article.

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Licensing Q&A

Ruben — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 08:33:51 +0000

I receive a licensing question from Yuvaraj Thiagarajan. Here is the question and my answer:

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Storing and retrieving data in a datasource

Ruben — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:44:35 +0000

During the creation of an Ajax applications there are many occasions when data is needed from an external or internal datasource. Often this data will be changed and is then sent back where it came from, or stored for later use. At a certain point I found myself using many different ways to retrieve data, using dozens of API calls, and sort-of similar systems. The logical step was to create a single consistent way to access a datasource, by formalizing a format for data storage and retrieval, the datasource instruction
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Javeline PlatForm Released under LGPL

Ruben — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 20:33:27 +0000

Posting this message from the mailinglist by Arnold Daniels

Hi all,

We’ve decided to release Javeline PlatForm Beta v0.98.2 under the LGPL (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html). While there were few cases where GPL would actually be a problem, the strictness of the license was scaring away potential users. We at Javeline, want developers using JPF to go to sleep at night without worrying about legal problems. Therefore we are switching to this less strict license. The dual-license system will stay in-place. The enterprise license will get you priority service.

For those already proficient with JPF, please talk about, show and blog about it. The platform is starting to take off, but to make this a successful project and ensure it will exist for a very long time, will need more users and for that we need more press.

Thanks for listening.

Best regards,
Arnold

Alignment, Layout, Docking and it’s State

Ruben — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 17:03:00 +0000

It was somewhere in 2002 or 2003 when I was looking for a method to position widgets on a plane. It was an early version of Javeline PlatForm and up until that moment I had only positioned elements using anchoring. I remembered a nice feature of Visual Basic, which allowed you to align components to one of the 4 directions. I could align a tree to the left, a toolbar to top and a statusbar to bottom.

I made an implementation of that and extended it by allowing N number of elements to have the same alignment. I also added a ‘middle’ alignment. Javeline PlatForm up until 0.98.1 supported only this way way of dealing with alignment. The latest version supports a new layouting engine. It works with vbox/hbox-es like many other GUI systems. What’s kinda new is the way it can load and save the layout state and how it implements a window docking system similar to Aptana, Eclipse and Visual Studio.

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Back button and state solution in Javeline PlatForm v0.98.2

Ruben — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 01:22:42 +0000

In this article I show you how to control the backbutton in your Javeline PlatForm application. I’ll take you step by step through creating a breadcrumb navigation for a typical product database site. It uses 4 states (similar to pages in static websites). The key to this implementation is that all state information is encoded in the hash. All information is stored in the url using the hash (http://example.com#information). This makes navigating your ajax site as intuitive as any website:

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Pitch at KingsOfCode

Ruben — Wed, 28 May 2008 08:40:15 +0000

Yesterday I was at KingsOfCode, a great get together for developers with talks by PPK and John Resig among others. I had the honor of having a 5 minute pitch about Javeline PlatForm. For those of you who want to see the presentation slides I’ve put them online here (dutch only, sorry!).