I’m an Echo2 user trying to change to It Mill 5, I would like to make some suggestions in the UI components that could be very good. If any of these already work, please tell me how, and sorry if it’s already known, I’m just trying to help.
I found a lot of getScreenWidth() and getScreenHeight() methods in the Application, WebBrowser classes but none had a right value.
Split Pane
2.1. Block the middle bar from being moved.
Window
3.1. Block resizing.
3.2. Hide the close button.
3.3. Block moving.
Other components
4.1. Setting the width and height with percentage units doesn’t work.
Please could you point an exact method where the bug occurs so that we can fix it.
More details needed also here.
We’ll try to be as quick as possible to fix any bugs found in beta, so everyone - please send us bug reports. The most easy way of doing this is by using bug-report form:
I found a lot of getScreenWidth() and getScreenHeight() methods in the Application, WebBrowser classes but none had a right value.
[/quote] It looks like they are unimplemented in the beta. In ApplicationServlet.java we have “// TODO Add screen height and width to the GWT client”. Will be fixed…
[quote]
2. Split Pane
2.1. Block the middle bar from being moved.
Window
3.1. Block resizing.
3.2. Hide the close button.
3.3. Block moving.
[/quote] Yes, these would be useful.
[quote]
4. Other components
4.1. Setting the width and height with percentage units doesn’t work.
[/quote] It should work. The problem may be that even if you set the size of a visible component to, say 100%, it will be scaled to that size inside its containing layout, and you need to use a sizeable layout. At least OrderedLayout doesn’t at the moment support sizing, but ExpandLayout does. See
http://www.itmill.com/documentation/itmill-toolkit-5-reference-manual/ch05s02.html#section.layout.expandlayout
With percentage units it is often hard to realize what is the reference size. The question is 100% (or any other percentage) of what?
With Toolkit the reference element is defined by container. So if you want to have for example a 100% height Table component you most likely want to define also it’s containers height. The most common mistake is to use relational units in normal OrderedLayout, that defines no height at all for its content cells.
So to use relational sizes, use them for components inside Sizeable containers like TabSheet, ExpandLayout, SplitPanel or Panel (with Panel most likely with ExpandLayout as its layout). You might want to have a look at FeatureBrowser’s code to get started with a nice flexible layout.
As another echo2 → itmill migrating user, I may add my couple of cents. In our server application we used echo2 for server administration console, so now I reproduced it in itmill. The main reasons we’re trying to move from echo is as follows:
echo2 looks terrinbly in terms of end-user’s feeling of what it see on a web page out of the box and requites creating custom styles in comparison to itmill, where default styles are pretty-enough for users and
echo2 does not work with native CSS, proving its own so called stylesheet format, that is harder to work with and requires intensive help from java developers, especially in a lack of documentation. In case of itmill/gwt, where native css used, our web designer was comfortable enough customizing interfaces alone, with no support from development person.
itmill layouts are more easier to work with for developer, even in case they’re in beta state.
More friendly documentation (not counting javadoc api) is also a huge “plus” to itmill.
From programming side, both frameworks brings very fast way , especially for swing experienced developer to create web application as well similar and nice deploying mechanism, where no external html/js/image files but only a servlet is required to host application.
I would also suggest to support more (or maybe all ?:)) current GWT controls in itmill as now it lacks some useful ones.
One of the design goals was to make it as easy as possible to “port” GWT widgets to IT Mill Toolkit. Basically you just 1) extend a widget and implement one method, 2) create simple server-side peer for it and you are done. So if your need to include some GWT controls, in most cases you can include them yourself in couple of hours.
Also we are planning to create proper client-side API:s for the current controls. This way GWT-users could use our widgets and use them without server-side. On the other hand this would give nicely back to GWT project and on the other hand it would allow easy creation of client-side composite widgets and logic (in cases it is needed).
Yes, that’s exactly what Im planning to do, when I’ll have more free time from the main activities. But in general new Itmill looks likes an ideal solution for me, as I always loved GWT’s style and widgets but needed exact server-side logic execution, so not those things joined together and this is really nice, and no matter there are some number of things to do until final release, I would like to thank you and congratulate with the great job being done!
I have tested percentage units with the TabSheet component, my idea of layout was to fill all the browser area with the TabSheet, regardless of the screen size. In this quest I also tried to use the ExpandLayout with another layout inside (FormLayout), no deal. But after I read in the manual that the ExpandLayout only works with Sizeable interface implemented components, I think that it would be great if it works with layouts (I didn’t tried to implement a layout with the Sizeable Interface yet, but I will).
I also know it’s hard to implement percentage, because if you have a
inside another
the 100% div will be the maximum of 200px width, and not the screen size.
The code below has a TabSheet that expands both horizontally and vertically to fill the main window. When I tried the tab sheet with OrderedLayout, it seemed to fill horizontally 100% just fine though.
[code]
// Create the layout
ExpandLayout expanding = new ExpandLayout(OrderedLayout.ORIENTATION_VERTICAL);
// It is important to set the expanding layout as the root layout
// of the containing window, in this case the main window, and not
// use addComponent(), which would place the layout inside the
// default root layout.
main.setLayout(expanding);
// Create a tab sheet that fills the expanding layout
final TabSheet tabsheet = new TabSheet();
tabsheet.addTab(new Label(“Contents of the first tab”), “First Tab”, null);
tabsheet.addTab(new Label(“Contents of the second tab”), “Second Tab”, null);
tabsheet.addTab(new Label(“Contents of the third tab”), “Third tab”, null);
// Set the tabsheet to scale to full size inside its container
tabsheet.getSize().setWidth(100, Size.UNITS_PERCENTAGE);
tabsheet.getSize().setHeight(100, Size.UNITS_PERCENTAGE);
// Add the tab sheet to the layout as usual
expanding.addComponent(tabsheet);
// Set the tab sheet to be the expanding component
expanding.expand(tabsheet);
[/code] Looks like this:
Updating the size of the tab sheet while resizing feels a bit sluggish, but not too much.
Another thing about the TabSheet in Echo2 is that we can put any Component in the Caption, in my case I’ve put a Close button component. You can put this as low priority :mrgreen: .
As far as I understood, data model for UI controls is represented by Container interface, that is a datasource, so it can be implemented to provide controls with data from your own source. For instance, for table you can set it by table.setContainerDataSource(myDataSource)
Mmm, what about it? If I have understood correctly, the purpose of Swing TableModel is same as the Container in IT Mill Toolkit, although Container is a bit more generic and allows also for other data structures than tables. So, do you have some implementation of TableModel for some special data source that you want to use with IT Mill Toolkit? I guess you could write an adapter between TableModel and Container quite easily.
hmm, great implementation, I will try to adapt an HibernateContainer.
Is there a listener for when the scroll is rolled and the data must be retrieved from the server? I have made something like it in Swing, so the Hibernate adapter would search for more in the database. I know it’s not a fast solution but in certain situations the list of items can be too big to put in the memory…
JoaoGalli - I suppose there is no such listener, however I may be mistaken. I think your implemented adapter must provide UI requested data and fetch them “on the fly” from the database instead from perfected array in memory.
Like in Swing’s TableModel, here UI will call a Container’s interface methods, requesting for data from particular rows, so you can do an actual database querying there.
For faster responses, you could pre-fetch data by 10… 100 items at once, for instance, when UI requests an item number 1, you can pre-fetch and cache items from 1 to 100.
