[wx-discuss] wxWeb Port licensing and naming

[John Wilmes]

On Sun, 22 Apr 2007 10:44:29 +0100, Julian Smart wrote:
> I raised the possibilty of writing wxWeb as a wxUniversal port and I'd 
> like to air it on this list to see how crazy an idea this is. The 
> advantages, if it worked, would include:
> 
> - massive time saving from not having to rewrite the basic controls
> - maximum compatibility with existing applications since by definition 
> the port would be good enough to support custom controls and arbitrary 
> graphics

I've been thinking about this, and on the whole I think it's a great idea.

> The main downside would be potential inefficiency since there would need 
> to be more net traffic to support the rendering and lower-level event 
> handling. However, clever caching could minimize the hit, and also, 
> basic controls could gradually be implemented 'natively'. Another 
> downside would (presumably) be the requirement for a Java-enabled 
> browser to implement the rendering. But that's possibly not too much of 
> a constraint.
You're right about the inefficiency. My hunch is that it would not only
be more net traffic (as you point out), but more frequent traffic, and
higher latency for simple operations, since I imagine that the browser
would have to consult the server more often for things like redrawing
buttons when they are pressed.

However, Java would probably be a bad choice for the drawing framework.
It would take away a lot of the incentive for using wxWidgets in the
first place for web work, and it would be extremely difficult to mix
optimized "native" controls with the Java-drawn controls.

Fortunately, a few other technologies exist, though none of them works
on every browser. Things like SVG, VML, and the <canvas> HTML extension
would all offer the functionality we need, and there exist a few (fairly
immature) Javascript wrappers around all of them, which take care of the
hard work of cross-browser support. I've been looking in particular at
the Dojo.gfx library.

-JW


---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: wx-discuss-unsubscribe at lists.wxwidgets.org
For additional commands, e-mail: wx-discuss-help at lists.wxwidgets.org