On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 7:50 PM, Colin Alworth <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 9:24 PM, Stephen Haberman < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> >> > Also we can use this as an opportunity to provide a compatibility >> > layer across different vendors and/or different widget systems. >> >> I suppose, technically yes. That is more complex than what I really had >> in mind...but if gets me widget interfaces, I suppose I'm interested. >> >> In general I'm skeptical about "vendor agnostic" widget APIs, because >> given how nit-picky perfect UIs have to be, it doesn't seem realistic to >> be able to switch implementations and still have things look right >> (other than some trivial theming). >> > > Agreement on this point - within GXT we annoy developers by not > implementing HasClickHandlers on our buttons, but instead using our own > HasSelectHandlers (distinct from HasSelectionHandlers). This frees us to > not require the 'click' event to activate a button - the user can tab into > a button and hit the space bar, even if the dom element doesn't magically > turn key events into clicks. Likewise some menu items (i.e. those with a > sub menu) activate on hover, while others on click. We've made a point of > distinguishing between the dom events and the logical events - effort to > standardize these interfaces will need to be careful to cover these details. > > Agreed. > >> > In upcoming weeks, we will start talking more about improving >> > UI+widget development in GWT. It is good to wait until that gets more >> > concrete before introducing/changing any APIs. >> >> No problem. Sounds interesting! >> >> Also, I'm really glad to hear you'll be keeping us non-Googlers in the >> loop. Perhaps it is naive, but with the re-open sourcing of GWT, I'd >> love to see more of Google's internal conversations about GWT happen in >> a public forum, like gwt-contrib. >> >> Totally understood that you can't discuss internal business details on a >> public forum, but it seems like a lot of open source projects have >> technical, cross-company discussions on their open mailing lists. >> > > +1 > With the steering committee in charge, any major decisions will go through there and usually that discussion is public. Also most of other technical discussions are already pubic via gerrit. I believe these processes will get more mature and open in time. That being said, I 'personally' think we need less proprietary and more future proof solution for UI development. It should ideally work well with different native/non-native widget sources. All of these points to a web-component based approach and I'm planning to experiment with that. Also like we were discussing above, I have more radical ideas like introducing a pseudo-widget layer, so that developers can program around interface definitions (like Label, TextInput, Button, Link, Select) that are deferred-bound at application level. Yes, that might just work for trivial UIs but I would love to give it at least a try and see how much we can benefit from it. If you have similar or alternative ideas, feel free to experiment, share and advocate for it :) On our side, when I have a more concrete proposal, I will definitely talk publicly about it to get feedback. I believe that any new major addition to GWT should first prove itself in real life before finding a home in GWT SDK, whether it is coming from GWT team or not. -- > -- > http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit-Contributors > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Google Web Toolkit Contributors" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > > -- -- http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit-Contributors --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Web Toolkit Contributors" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
