We're looking for some feedback from the dojo community on a visual page design tool we're building at projectzero.org (community development site for WebSphere sMash).
General Features:
- 100% dojo-based
- Generates html pages that are 100% dojo+html+css+js
- Browser-based
- Runs disconnected (on a very small footprint client runtime).
Visual Page Editor Features:
- DnD page editing for most Dijit and Dojox widgets (more coming soon)
- Flow or Absolute positioning layout modes
- Proper handing of nested containers/child widgets
- Widget and page-level property sheets
- CSS property sheets
- Datasource creation
- Databinding
- Design/Source code views
- Event handlers (uses dojox/wires and declarative script event handlers)
This is a work in progress, and we still have lots of additional things coming over the next few months, but we would like to get feedback from the best community of developers that will be using it while we're still early in dev cycle.
Quick Instructions to get you to the cool parts of the builder app:
- Follow the simple install instructions here. You have to install the command line interface first, then follow the instructions for starting the app builder. The script will download additional maven modules containing the dev tool, start it up and launch the browser. Be patient, it may take time for the dependencies to download initially until the browser appears.
- Once you're in the application builder, create a new app, and then inside that app create a New Page... (html) in the /public folder (something like /public/testpage.html). This will launch the visual page designer tool on a blank html page. From here you can Drag and drop widgets from the palette on the right onto the page, and right click or use the Properties menu to changes properties, styles and events. The Structure view shows an outline of all the visual and non-visual widgets on the page, and the data tab allows you to create dojo.data DataStores. Go to the property sheet for databound widgets like grid to set the databinding to the datastores in the page.
- Click on the Source view to view and edit the html/js/css source and switch back to Design view.
- You can start the app using the Start link, then open a new browser window on http://localhost:8080/{yourpage.html} <-- Note: no need for /public and should see the page you built here.
If you need help, pc me chrism on /dojo IRC or send email to ccmitchellusa at gmail dot com, or please feel free to join projectzero.org and post to the forums there.
We're really excited about the progress we're making on this tool and hope that it helps accelerate dojo development in a big way.
Enjoy!
Chris Mitchell
IBM/WebSphere/Project Zero/Dojo
Complete end-to-end demo
Once you've played around a bit with the editor, you'll find an end-to-end application tutorial here:
http://www.projectzero.org/sMash/1.0.x/docs/zero.devguide.doc/zero.sugge...
couple of install gotchas.....
Couple of things I ran across that might be of some help to others (these are documented in places if you look around long enough):
1. Your JRE must be the 32-bit version. If you installed the 64-bit version (which I had on rhel4) you will get a word size mismatch probably.
2. On linux there is a little shell logic in appbuilder2 that determines which java it's going to run, so you'll want to set JAVA_HOME (or whatever it was), or otherwise account for that to point to whichever one you want.
3. ProjectZero installs in 'localhost mode'. If you try to get at it from another system you'll probably get a 403 or something like that. Refer to the very end of the PZ Getting Started Guide for instructions on how to get around that.
4. I think you'll have trouble getting to any data resources, due to the same-origin jazz, but there are various ways around that ... I haven't done it yet, but I think there were proxy instructions somewhere.
5. As best as I can tell, ProjectZero is commercial ($10,000 min), but only for "big installations". Looks like they license you for up to 4 physical systems at your location, with up to 4 processor cores each, or it could be 4 single core or 1 4-core, I couldn't tell. At least, that's for the Project Zero main stuff, I didn't catch the AppBuilder licensing.
Dylan Tynan
Clarification
I meant, I think it's $10K for big installations, but free for the small guys (the up to 4 systems stuff). So if you've just got a couple of systems to play around with, I think it's free.
Dylan Tynan
This Tool
This Web tool could be a good development for the coming time. One must express the developers acknowledgment for the clarity and operability of this tools. A greeting from Thuringia in Germany!