> As for the Websnap thing, I did not tought about it; but I once > imagined that as we have support for gtk / qt / win32... we could have > a layer for 'psp' so as to generate forms in web format. (And push it > a little bit more and you can have a full AJAX application compiled > with lazarus. But this kind of stuff is no more freepascal.) So a CGI > that generate a perfect replresentation of a screen designed in > lazarus could be done all from lazarus itself. Add the same features > for reports,etc. > > That would be awesome. You switch from gtk destination to psp > destination and the same project that was a stand-alone app becomes a > cgi that can generate itself its visual representation and call back > itself to process the commands. (That would require some javascrip... > ajax crap).
With CSS absolute pixel positioning (rather than relative positioning) to have things land on the screen at your desired destination using X/Y coordinates.. But as soon as you get into x/y coordinate positioning it means your app might be better off as a real thin client application anyway. But Ajax means no shipping of the application. At least it means that right now - in the future ajax might be able to read special config files in the form of cookies, or something - to me it seems sort of like reinventing thin clients.. but are there other advantages I'm missing of ajax, other than you don't have to ship it like you do a thin client (and you don't have to compile it). A good example of a thin client that works well, but is not ajax - AVG antivirus for windows. It is a real software application that connects to the internet every day to upgrade your virus definition. And it works perfectly. There was no need for AVG to become an ajax app because being a real app worked too - AVG could be an ajax app - you could log on to the AVG website and have it check your PC for viruses - but if it works well as a non-ajax app why not just ship it as a non-web program. Well I guess it means that AVG is stuck shipping their app, and that they could have used ajax if they didn't want to ship it - or they could have used VBScript based website. But is shipping really that hard of an effort? Shipping an app is a hard effort, but is it worth the effort? I think in many cases it's worth shipping an app - maybe in the cases where it is not worth shipping an app ajax is the solution? Well one advantage of AJAX is that no shipping or installing of the program is needed - but eventually if Ajax becomes complex enough that it can store data on your PC, such as config files, skins, etc, then I think it is essentially reinventing the thin client.. I mean let's say it uses cookies to store your skin or your configuration for the ajax app - well isn't this just a config file? So it really is just shipping a config file onto your computer in the form of a cookie - but if it gets complex enough that the cookie is to simplified and it needs to store other Lots of the work I do on the web actually requires my web pages to have tons of text on the pages so that my sites become popular on the search engines - so the whole AJAX thing is kind of wishy washy to me for those things.. but it is not always just about getting your thousands of text pages on the engines.. But I mean it also begs the question - if you are going to make an AJAX app why not just compile a lazarus application and send it to your users - have TCP/IP in the program connect to your web server, compile your lazarus app on all platforms and ship the EXE/ELF/BSDexe. I guess AJAX requires no shipping of the application, and no installation of the application. Right now my main focus with web development is building websites with 200,000-500,000 pages of content - or at least thousands of pages of content - so ajax doesn't help there much, but it could be useful for things like banking websites where people need to see a proper graph of their investments, and proper sessions on the website without sending an HTTP request for each little thing they do on the site (the whole point of ajax) > > Any-way this might not be the good place to talk about that. And this > 'vision' is only mine. As far as I can see it, psp is actually a nice > technology kit to build cgi apps for the web. You can join the mailing list if you like.. http://psp.furtopia.org/cgi-bin/psp/maillist.psp We have done some work with CSS/HTML to get direct positioning available on the screen - we try to use CSS whereever possibel and only use Javascript where absolutely needed Actually, Tony on our team has made a web application that is sort of like Ajax - it uses javascript and CSS/HTMl and is an mp3 player that works right inside the web browser, like a real software application works. In this case, Tony may have invented Ajax himself, but he just really wasn't calling it Ajax. I'm sort of a mix myself - I can see Ajax advantages but I also like building huge 200,000 page websites with mainly text and little graphics, and no javascript - since those get listed on the search engines nicely. Ajax wouldn't help you on the search engines, nor would flash - but it could help banking sites, and help hold your users in your website once you have gotten them there using text based pages first to draw them in from the engines. Banking sites that use cheezy tactics like HTTP requests to send your banking information to the next page.. instead of using something more persistent - is a problem that ajax or a thin client could solve. Tony's musicbox program does use a few tricks to make the state more persistent, such as launching child processes and doing some java tricks. _________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject archives at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailarchives
