On 1-feb-2007, at 10:51, Guyren Howe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Next, Swordfish is great. I would love to see Swordfish. But
swordfish is almost entirely for writing the server side of a web
application. I'm after a way to write the client side.
Guyren,
Such tools already exist. Have a look at Adobe Flex. It is Flash for
application developers. The IDE is based on Eclipse and runs on Mac
and Windows. It contains a GUI builder, an advanced code editor,
debugger etc. It comes with many pre-built user interface widgets to
create a rich user interface. It uses two programming languages: MXML
and ActionScript. MXML is an XML based language, which is mostly used
for declarative things such as describing the user interface,
transitions, data binding etc. For more advanced logic you use
ActionScript (version 3.0) which is a very complete programming
language with features similar to Java.
FlexBuilder (the IDE) is a commercial product, but not that expensive
(about $500). The compiler and the framework are available for free.
The compiler is a command line tool.
The entire product goes way beyond OpenLaszlo and does not require
any special software on the server side. You can use any programming
language for the back end. Usually you communicate with the back end
using SOAP or HTTP/XML requests. But there is also a binary format
called AMF that can automatically serialize objects from the client
to the server and vice versa and call remote methods. Also I think
that Flex will have a much broader community support, simply because
Adobe is a big company with more influence on the software industry.
Since the source files are plain text and since the compiler can be
called from the command line, you can use RB to create Flash files
without using any plugins. Such an approach would be much more
capable and stable than using Ming.
I had once written a 4D plugin for Ming, just as an experiment. I did
not continue the product as it was impossible for me to get it stable
enough for production use. It was full of memory leaks. Fixing those
would be a major undertaking. This was about 3 years ago, at a time
where the Ming project was almost abandoned. The situation might have
improved since then, I don't know. But still, I think that using Flex
would be a better idea.
Best,
- Rob Laveaux
--------------------------------------------------------
Pluggers Software
Thijssestraat 203
2521 ZG Den Haag
The Netherlands
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Website: http://www.pluggers.nl
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