Good questions, let me do my best to answer. Here is a bunch of things, in no particular order:
XAP is intended for application development, rather than web-page development. If you have a standard web-page and want a fancy widget or two in it then XAP is probably not a good choice. If you want a web-page that is mostly fancy widgets XAP should be a good choice. That is what the proposal is aiming for anyway. Dojo is really geared for creating a standard HTML page with a few dojo widgets inside of it, as opposed to an application with some html imbedded or surrounding it. Xap makes it easy to mix and match toolkits. While it may not be that likely or helpful that you would want to mix a Dojo button with a Zimbra combobox it may be much more likely that you would want to put a google map or yahoo map in a Dojo tabbed pane, use a charting/graphing package from some other place, etc. I imagine that most if not all of the basic widgets will come from one toolkit by default, but any extensions or more specialized widgets could come from a variety of places. Xap keeps a persistent XML model of your application and you can manipulate that model via xmodify as well as with DOM operations. This model is the application UI model which is separate from the HTML DOM itself. In Dojo once a widget is instantiated if you want to change it you either have to use the javacsript APIs or manipulate the browser DOM itself. Xap allows you to declare macros and code snippets that have a lifecycle and live in a container with unique names for later referencing. This means you don't need a lot of top-level functions and objects lying around. Hopefully this will make it easier to create larger applications that require multiple programmers, some more organization, and that sort of thing. More structure may be overkill for simple apps but is nice when things start getting more complex. Xap allows you to invoke these macros and code objects via XML with a declaritive syntax that allows for nested calls, object references, etc. In general there is a lot of stuff you can do in XML, not just declaring the initial UI but declaring objects, calling methods, manipulations, etc. Xap will have some data-binding stuff at some point hopefully. The comparison to XUL is accurate to some degree. However there are some key differences: XAP allows you to do many more things declaritively, for one. Also XAP is using Dojo but is not based on Dojo in and is also easily extendable. I think if you look at the complicated example that has a google map and zimbra components it should give you some idea of what the value is. The application is a mix of google, zimbra and plain HTML all integrated together with a common syntax and programming model. Today you really don't see a lot of complicated applications written with Dojo or with javascript at all. (Or I don't, anyway :) ) I don't know what tiles is, do you have a link? Hope this helped to some degree, James Margaris -----Original Message----- From: C. Grobmeier [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, June 30, 2006 4:33 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Scope and Templating -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Cheers guys, i am playing with ajax at the moment and try out dojo. i was curious why i should use XAP some time? Meaning, it seams you are building a kind of scripting language (like XUL) based on dojo. Why are you not simply using dojo? What will be the advances? When i have this xap script, is this also a templating engine? I am using tiles at the moment, can i think about xap as a replacement for tiles? or is it an extension? Sorry for my dump questions, maybe you could enlighten me a bit :-) Cheers, Chris -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2.1 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFEpOG0kv8rKBUE/T4RAkBTAJ9uwGngeQ/k2qRjqAtHtIBJyEb2rgCfSOrg xEqx24E8OQ8sC1EH/z6OG+A= =/wjK -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
