Thank you guys for your answers; it clears up a lot of confusion. Does any of you know the reason behind this "widget format"? It seems to be a bit like playing the piano with gloves on. If I understand correctly, this might also hurt the performance of the website. Since you are effectively inserting a new HTML sub-page, all javascripts local to that page needs to be parsed every time a widget is used even if it has been used before.
Regards, Michael ----- Original Message ----- From: "Nicolaas Matthijs" <[email protected]> To: "Bert Pareyn" <[email protected]> Cc: "Apisak Darakananda" <[email protected]>, [email protected] Sent: Monday, July 9, 2012 5:23:05 PM Subject: Re: [oae-dev] A Question about Widgets Hi Michael, As Bert said, the config file is used to register your widget in the application. It tells the application what the name of the widget is, where it can be used, which languages it's available in, etc. The HTML file is basically all of the HTML that the widget itself will want to show on the screen, which can be as much or as little as your widget requires. The application will take care of the actual loading of your widget and putting it in the right place in the UI, so there's no need to worry about that inside of your widget. However, the application will pass in the unique id of the container your widget will be loaded into, so you can always use that in case you need it. Hope that helps, Nicolaas On 9 Jul 2012, at 10:47, Bert Pareyn wrote: Hi Michael, You're right in saying that each widget needs its own folder with an HTML, config and JavaScript file. The widget HTML page contains the elements specific for that widget. You will notice that the file does not have the usual structure (with body, head, title,…) because widgets are injected into the page later on (pages like /dev/index.html, /dev/content_profile.html, …). To load a widget into the page we create a div with a specific ID. e.g.: <div id="widget_topnavigation" class="widget_inline"></div>. This is picked up by the widget loading mechanism in sakai.api.Widgets and the widget HTML is placed inside of the container. The configuration files for each widget tell the widget where it can be placed, what the translations are, etc. Hope that helps, - Bert On 8 Jul 2012, at 17:34, Darakananda, Apisak wrote: <blockquote> Hello all, Sorry if this has been discussed elsewhere; I have not been able to find any documentation on it. I am planning to join the project at GaTech this Fall, and I am trying to get a sense of how the project is set up. I am confused by the way the widgets. According to the Hello World demo, each widget is supposed to get its own folder, HTML page, a config file, among other things. I completely agree that a widget should have its own folder, but I don't quite understand what the HTML page and config file are for. The way I currently see it, shouldn't it be enough for a widget to have a method "getRootElement()"? (Of course, the name could be made shorter!) That way to put a widget onto a page, we just need to someContainer.appendChild(myWidget.getRootElement()). Thank you for your help! Michael -- Apisak "Michael" Darakananda [email protected] "The bus station is where the bus stops. The train station is where the train stops. On my desk, I have a workstation." _______________________________________________ oae-dev mailing list [email protected] http://collab.sakaiproject.org/mailman/listinfo/oae-dev _______________________________________________ oae-dev mailing list [email protected] http://collab.sakaiproject.org/mailman/listinfo/oae-dev </blockquote> -- Apisak "Michael" Darakananda [email protected] "The bus station is where the bus stops. The train station is where the train stops. On my desk, I have a workstation."
_______________________________________________ oae-dev mailing list [email protected] http://collab.sakaiproject.org/mailman/listinfo/oae-dev
