I want to use a template engine in a struts application and would like to know if using TILES can be recommended instead of FREEMARKER or VELOCITY.
I've used tiles before on a project. It was good for templating, however it can't really be compared to velocity or freemarker: with Tiles you use normal JSPs and are limited to the JSP tags youv'e got.
Velocity (and probably Freemarker although I haven't used it before) provide their own tags or expression language, so you can do thinks like:
Hello ${name}
Which you can't do in plain JSPs. [updated due to comment: in JSP 2.0, EL is included so you can do things like that. However, I think Velocity or Freemarker are more powerful in terms of what you can do with it.]
If you've got a layout with lots of different components (i.e. header, sidebar, etc) and you want to define various different templates, tiles isn't a bad choice. (Although be warned - it can be quite a lot of XML!)
But if you need something more "advanced" than plain JSPs Velocity or Freemarker might be the way to go.
I use tiles and velocity.
Tiles is great for dividing a page in components and reuse markup between screens while velocity is a great template language such smarty in the php world.
I recommend not to choose between tiles and velocity but instead use both. They complement each other really well.
Or you could use Stripes. MUCH easier than Tiles!
Related
I'm trying to design a desktop UI for schematics, layout, drawing stuff. Just looking for high level advice from actual software designers.
Assuming an in-memory "database", (clojure map of arbitrary depth for all user data, and possibly another one for application preferences, etc.), I'm examining how to do the model-view-controller thing on these, where the data may be rendered and modified by any one or more of:
A standalone text field that shows a single parameter, such as box width.
An "inspector" type of view that shows multiple parameters of a selected object, such as box width, height, color, checkboxes, etc.
A table/spreadsheet type of view that shows multiple parameters of multiple objects, potentially the whole database
A graphical rendering of the whole thing, such as both schematic and layout view.
Modifying any one of these should show up immediately in every other active view, both text and graphical, not after clicking "ok"... so no modal boxes allowed. If for some reason the table view, an inspector view, and a graphical rendering are all in view, dragging the corner of the box graphically should immediately show up in the text, etc.
The platform in question is JavaFX, but I'd like a clean separation between UI and everything else, so I want to avoid binding in the JFX sense, as that ties my design data very tightly to JFX Properties, increases the graininess of the model, and forces me to work outside the standard clojure functions for dealing with data, and/or deal heavily with the whole getValue/setValue world.
I'm still assuming at least some statefulness/mutability, and the use of built-in Clojure functionality such as the ability to add-watch on an atom/var/ref and let the runtime signal dependent functions.
Platform-specific interaction will rest tightly with the actual UI, such as reifying ActionListeners, and dealing with ObservableValues etc., and will attempt to minimize the reliance on things like JavaFX Property for actual application data. I'm not entertaining FRP for this.
I don't mind extending JFX interfaces or making up my own protocols to use application-specific defrecords, but I'd prefer for the application data to remain as straight Clojure data, unsullied by the platform.
The question is how to set this all up, with closest adherence to the immutable model. I see a few options:
Fine-grain: Each parameter value/primitive (ie Long, Double, Boolean, or String) is an atom, and each view which can modify the value "reaches in" as far as it needs to in the database to change the value. This could suck as there could potentially be thousands of individual values (for example points on a hand-drawn curve), and will require lots of (deref...) junk. I believe this is how JFX would want to do this, with giant arrays of Properties at the leaf nodes, etc., which feels bloated. With this approach it doesn't seem much better than just coding it up in Java/C++.
Medium-grain: Each object/record in the database is an atom of a Clojure map. The entire map is replaced when any one of its values changes. Fewer total atoms to deal with, and allows for example long arrays of straight-up numbers for various things. But this gets complicated when some objects in the database require more nesting than others.
Coarse-grain: There is just one atom: the database. Any time anything changes, the entire database is replaced, and every view needs to re-render its particular portion. This feels a bit like using a hammer to swat a fly, and a naive implementation would require everything to re-render all the time. But I still think this is the best trade off, as any primitive has a clear access path from the root node, whether it is accessed on a per-primitive level or per-record level.
I also need the ability for one data template to be instantiated many times. So for example if the user changes a symbol or shape which is used in multiple places, a single edit will apply everywhere. I believe this also requires some type of "pointer"-like behavior. I think I can store a atom to the model, then instantiate as needed, and it can work in any of the above grain models.
Any other approaches? Is trying to do a GUI editor-like tool in a functional language just stupid?
Thanks
I don't think is stupid to use a functional language to do a GUI editor-like tool. But I can't claim to have an answer to your question. Here are some links that might help you in your journey:
Stuart Sierra - Components Just Enough Structure
Chris Granger - Light Table: Explains how Light Table (source) is structured.
Chris Granger - The IDE as a Value: blog post related to the video above
Conal Elliott - Tangible Functional Programming: Using Functional Reactive Programming to create a composable UI, but his code is in Haskell.
Nathan Herzing & Chris Shea - Helping voters with Pedestal, Datomic, Om and core.async
David Nolen - Comparative Literate Programming: Shows all to use core.async to simplify UI programming in ClojureScript. The ideas here can be used in a desktop UI.
Rich Hickey - The Language of the System: Amazing talk about system programming by the creator of Clojure.
Erik Meijer has a good quote about functional vs imperative code:
...no matter whether it's Haskell, C# Java, F#, Scala, Python, PHP think about the idea of having a sea of imperative code that interacts with the outside world and in there have islands of pure code where you write your functions in a pure way.
But you have to decide how big the islands are and how big the sea is. But the answer is never that there are only islands or only sea. A good programmer knows exactly the right balance.
I'm looking for TYPO3 template libraries. They don't need to be free. I'm looking for real Typo3 templates, ready to import into a vanilla Typo3 installation, not just HTML or even PSD templates.
The reason I'm asking is that we have a number of customers with very tight budget. We'd like to give them a number of templates to choose from.
There were such projects, but I assume that most of them are just finished now. TYPO3 has no default data/content structure and therefore it's hard to build useful sets as every implementation can be very individual.
For your own low-budget production I'd suggest to create some very typical raw implementations with sample data and some kind of preconfigured extensions ie.
CMS+ News + contact form + gallery,
CMS + News + FAQ...
etc...
Then you can also prepare common TypoScript element for each scenario and finally just use any HTML template and map your prepared TS with minimal modifications.
Using TemplaVoila you don't need to change any single char in the HTML templates and it takes no more than 2 morning coffees (when mapping a simple template).
A simple Typo3 template isn't really difficult to make but I think you mean a better browser compatibility support. Personally I've good experience with YAML.
I'm not aware of anything like that out there, but is it just for content sites, or are you looking for sites with more functionality?
Any template can be adapted to TYPO3, you can see here http://webdevelopers.thedemo.ca/ where in the space of about an hour we grabbed a template from http://www.oswd.org/ and turned it into a TYPO3 site. It's rough and messy, but shows the idea.
I have a django app and I would like to display some graphical data visualization to my users. I am looking for an easy-to-use package that would allow me to add graphs and widgets.
The kind of widget I want to build is a kind of speedometer dial that is red at one end and green at the other. As a user completes their job over the day, the graphic/widget adjusts itself. The dial moves from red to green.
I also want an S-curve graphic that shows the cumulative amount of work accomplished against planned. That is kind of an x/y line plot.
My question are: How easy is this to implement? Are there any add-ins libraries or packages that do this already? I am trying to keep my entire application open-source. I've seen a couple subscription services that do this type of thing, but I can't stomach the cost.
I don't mind using ajax or jquery to implement such a thing, but I would like the most elegant and maintainable solution.
Any advice or examples on how to tackle this project?
There are lots of good javascript libraries these days, but all require some effort to learn how to use. I have not found one that really is easy to use, I guess because everyone wants something different. My general experience has been the more effort you put into learning them, the more you get out.
Google has gauges: http://code.google.com/apis/chart/interactive/docs/gallery/gauge.html
Also
http://www.flotcharts.org/
http://philogb.github.com/jit/
http://www.highcharts.com/
http://www.jqplot.com/
Or really take control:
http://mbostock.github.com/protovis/
As first, see the following grid (https://www.djangopackages.com/grids/g/dashboard-applications/) on djangopackages.
Not sure if that's exactly what's asked for, but you might take a look at django-dash (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-dash).
It allows each user to make his own dashboard (from plugins available). Those dashboards can be made public.
Some screenshots (http://pythonhosted.org/django-dash/#screenshots).
It's modular and plugin based, so you need to make a plugin and widgets for every specific feature (in this particular case - the speedometer plugin and widgets for it). Each plugin/widget can include own JS/CSS when being rendered.
See the following chart usage examples:
D3.js integration examples (https://github.com/barseghyanartur/django-dash/tree/master/example/example/d3_samples).
Polychart2.js integration example (https://github.com/barseghyanartur/django-dash/blob/master/example/example/bar/).
protovis is no longer under active development, but they started a new poject: http://d3js.org/
You may choose from these packages:
https://www.djangopackages.com/search/?q=dash
What are some common use cases for implementing CFML Custom Tag (not CFX tag)? In 3 yrs of my CF exp I've never written one. Would someone please enlighten me, under which use case / situation would one choose custom tag over cfc / udf?
Remember that custom tags were, at one time, the only method available to extend CFML (up until version 4) - UDFs came later (CF 5) and CFCs later still (CF MX). They're not as commonly used as they once were for the simple reason that there are more options.
Custom tags are basically procedural in nature in a language that, with CFCs, become more and more OO in practice. This is another reason that they're not very common.
But there's still cases where they come in handy (but are never required) - mostly for interface work. The ability to create both a start and end state can definately come in handy. A simple example could be a "wrapper" for page content the opening tag might add the HTML header and page navigation while the closing tag would add the footer and end the page.
In this way your page content could be nothing more than:
<cfmodule... >
Page Content!
</cfmodule>
Of course there are other ways to do this as well - but sometimes the classics still have value. ;^)
Look at the CFUniform project for a great example of custom tag usage. Custom Tags are great when building reusable pieces for the UI portion of an application.
I think that, for the most part, custom tags have mostly fallen by the wayside since UDFs, CFCs, and integration with Java (and to a lesser degree .NET) allowed easier and more straightforward ways to do similar things.
Looking back to when I started in CF5, I can think of several examples. A good one might be CFX)Zip, which allowed interaction with Zip files before that was available directly through CF.
The only use I can think of offhand in a more modern context would be to provide precompiled code that wasn't written in Java or .NET, such as proprietary doodads written in C. That's a pretty niche use, though.
Honestly, I imagine at this point they exist more or backwards comatibility than anything else.
Ever since CFCs came out I've stopped using custom tags simply because of the overhead. They take too long to initiate and execute. But like #Jim Davis said, they may be useful where you need to write a tag that wraps around other content.
But in a well defined solution, you can do way with them all together.
I am doing some web data classification task and was thinking if I could get the co-ordinates of html elements as they would appear on a web-browser without taking into consideration any css or javascript being referred in the web page.
My language of programming is c++ and the need results for a couple million of pages, so it has to be fast. I know there is a Microsoft COM component which renders the page in a web browser control and then can be queried for position of different html tags. But this is not suitable in my case as it first renders the whole page which takes up a lot of time.
So as I found out, there are open-source layout engines WebKit, Gecko that can probably be used for this. But that's a huge piece of code and I need someone to direct me to the right classes or right modules to look into or any previous/similar work someone has done previously. Also, please let me know what you guys think is a good choice if I want to customize the existing code for use with multiple threads to make it faster.
Thanks
Generally, you would find that different page rendering engines do render the html in their own way and the results will differ.
The thing is that if you stick to any concrete browser engine, what you are to do is somehow bringing this engine into your project and using engine's interface to retrieve these coordinates. Kind of a tough task though, simply because you'll have to read a lot of documentation and crawl through thousands of files.
I think that right approach would be posting this task in some place, that is specific for the page rendering engine you've chosen. (gecko/webkit/...)
If you prefer sticking to something MS-specific, guess it's gonna be easier, but can't help you with something like class names or code chunks that you want to see. Probably somebody else could guide you in this case.