[Zope-dev] VisualStudio Product ideas

[Martijn Faassen]

Anthony Pfrunder wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Noting the recent release of the excellent XML Widgets of M.Faassen and
> the discussion on wysiwyg I thought I better pre-annouce my upcoming
> VisualStudio for Zope in case other people are working on the same thing.
[snip description]

Hm, I'm not sure I get it exactly yet, though what I do understand
sounds exciting. The idea is that you abstract Javascript + HTML in XML,
so that you can design advanced web pages in an abstract way, right?
Please explain some of the applications you have in mind for this?

My XMLWidgets are quite different in the sense that a widget is a Python
class, and widgets are used to display individual XML nodes (of whatever
type you desire), and to respond to any events that occur in them.

Perhaps we can merge some of the ideas of XMLWidgets and VisualStudio
together, though.

Another, somewhat related, topic that I've been investigating (coding
will start shortly) is the creation of 'Formulator'. This would be an
easy way to construct HTML forms (with database backend) in Zope.
Basically you'd put a lot of form elements (such as textareas, input
boxes, etc) in a folder. Each form element would know how to display
itself and how to validate its own contents, both client side (java
script) and server side (always necessary, in Zope). Some XML Document
or somesuch can then be used to layout the form elements into a form.
SQL methods should be automatically generated if desired.

If we could get all this GUI type work (XMLWidgets, VisualStudio,
Formulator) into somekind of unified framework that is Zopish, that
would be very nice. I don't have any clear clues on how to do this,
however. :)

Did anybody install and try XMLWidgets yet? Did it work at all? :)
 
Regards,

Martijn