List of wishes:

[whisperstorm]

Ok since I've been digging into lzx for a short time I wanted to post a laundry list of sorts of wishes

1) some way to dump the dom tree in the debugger - or put the lxz in a mode where you can click a element on screen and see what it's dom path is (like mozilla's DOM inspector)

2) a library of transitions, blends, fades, etc.

3) more support for style sheets

4) more widgets - scrollbars, controls, toolbar, docking, combobox...

5)be able to set the layout in the container tag vs some singleton tag inside some view - it's easy to lose track of it and it seems a little counterintuitive... seems like it should be an attribute of a container, not just a tag floating around inside :)

6) more examples of extending the base classes

7) more examples of database/datapointer use

8)"best practices" - that hard to capture information about how to organize an app, how the code is typically formed - etc.

[antun]

Wow this is terrific!

I've filed 1), 5), 6), 7) and 8) as feature requests. With regards to 2) (library of blends...), could you elaborate a little more? How would you expect this? As a tag inside the view you want to affect?

As for 3), do you mean use a CSS document?

As for 4), there are lots of new components on the way already.

-Antun

[whisperstorm]

Would be cool to know what the specs are for creating new components... I'd like to make a few and possibly submit them back to the core, or perhaps a 3rd party set of libraries.

[metasarah]

We plan to make a beta available to developers in November. You would then be able to try out the new components and build your own!

[bgardella]

Simple integration with jsps via tag extensions:

<lzx:import page="/common/laslo/mylazlo.lzx" />

There will be more. And they will be focused on the middle tier.

--ben

[antun]

Can you elaborate? I'm not quite sure what you mean here.

-Antun

Originally posted by bgardella
Simple integration with jsps via tag extensions:

<lzx:import page="/common/laslo/mylazlo.lzx" />

There will be more. And they will be focused on the middle tier.

--ben

[bgardella]

Sorry about that. My sites are all built with jsp/struts/jboss. Right now, for me to use laszlo, I have to write a *.lzx file, hit it with my app server (jboss running lps) which spits out html. Copy that html output to a *.jsp file, and then add the following line in my pre-exisiting jsp file:

<jsp:include page="/my_laszlo.jsp" flush="true"/>

I want a tag that does all that for me.

--ben

[antun]

Are you saying that your servlet container won't allow you to hit a .lzx page directly?

-Antun

[bgardella]

No, I am not saying that. I can do this:

http://localhost:888/mylaszlo.lzx

But I can't do this in my jsp page:

<jsp:include page="/mylaszlo.lzx" flush="true"/>


--ben

[bgardella]

Forget I said anything. I can do this.

Nevermind.

--ben

[ows]

How did you end up solving this? I bet it would be useful to other people too.

[bloch]

The /foo.lzx requrest returns you an entire
HTML page (wrapper).

You can make a request for the swf directly with
/foo.lzx?lzt=swf but then you'll need to
write your own object/embed html tags.

The wrapper has the canvas size done correctly
for you.

We could provide a request type that responded
with html bits that are embeddable in an html page,
I spose.

-Eric

[bgardella]

This doesn't produce totally correct html, but it could if the tag wrote the html wrapper correctly. Someone else can do that. The file reference also has to be absolute, but it could easily be made relative.

Attached is a zip file of the following:

The Tag Code [LaszloFileTag.java]
The Tag definition file [laszlo.tld]
A sample jsp file [index.jsp]
A sample lzx file [code.lzx]

Now I can introduce laszlo objects easily into any of my hundreds of pre-existing set of jsp pages.

--ben

[cwalker]

That's a very clean maneuver.

One thing you could do is use the lzt=html command
to generate cleaner output without compilation warnings, etc...

<lz:LaszloFile file="/code.lzx?lzt=html" />

if you wrapped that in a <div> tag you would be
html-legit, since <div> tags don't mind
<html>
<body>
tags.

Finally, it would be really cool down the road to
support a straight lzt=swf command, where pure
swf bytecode is returned - this would require an
<object>/<embed> wrapper to embed in html.

Awesome work Ben!
Clean code too ;)

cheers,
-christian

[dionatan]

What about
?lzt=object-tag