Re: [Phpgroupware-developers] the new templating system

[Dan Kuykendall]

Im not yet sure how its all going to work out best. I just want to find 
the best solution for phpgw.

My goals, and I think this match up with ceb, are:

1) To abstract more of the UI from each app
2) More consistancy between apps
3) an easier method for apps to get data from other apps and be able to 
display that data. So appB could request data from appA as well as the 
UI definition for displaying that data.

4) to have very nice looking html so that the interface can be very 
attractive

5) needs to perform abot as well or better than the current solution. At 
worst the tradeoff will be a very sligh performance loss (we can pick up 
that loss by fixing other areas of phpGW.
6) needs to be at least partially xml based and in a way that would more 
easily allow for generating other interfaces such as XUL, GTK or 
WinForms, etc...

After spending what seems like way too much time on all this, we have 
learned a great deal. Heres a run down.

ceb ported the notes app to etemplates. ralf helped and had to add new 
stuff to etemplates to support this, such as adding in some new 
nextmatches support. notes works in etemplates, but ceb is not entirely 
happy with the performance or with the resulting html. ralf has a few 
new fixes for the performance, but the html result is still need to be 
worked on.

ceb is now trying out my xmltool and xsltemplate class on notes. She has 
just started but is very happy with the resulting html and performance.


The problem with xsl is that each app would end up needing to support 
other interfaces on their own. For example, if we wanted a gtk or xul 
interface, each app would need to have a template set for generating 
those interfaces. With etemplates we just need to do this in the api by 
having a conversion of the widgets and all apps will automaticly be 
presented in those interfaces. I think this would be a great great feature.

So right now XSL has the clear advantage in producing attractive html, 
and etemplates has the advantage of interface independance. Both help 
solve 1, 2 and 3 in my above list. XSL does 4 and 5 but not much for 6. 
etemplates does 6 great, is weak in 4 and so far with 5 but ralf says 
his fixes will help on 5.

So seeing that etemplates is weak were xsl is strong and xsl is weak 
where etemplates is strong, we are going to look at a marrage of the 
two. This would mean that apps would just define their basic interface 
in xml (XML Layout Doc, XLD for short), this XLD is very XUL like. 
etemplates would load this up, do the calls to the bo class that is 
specified in the xml layout doc. It will generate the xml result, load 
up the xslt templates which are needed and let the XSLT template class 
take over. In XSL we will have a version of every needed widget which 
will be used to generate the html.
So we will have various template sets, which will actually be XSL files.

We will also want to figure out how to have a special way for app 
developers to customize their html. So that they will still define the 
interface in the XLD, but will also be able to have direct control of 
the overall layout of the app when its presented in HTML. I am still 
trying to figure out how best to solve this and still make sure they are 
using etemplates, so that their app can run via gtk, xul and so on.

We always look forward to feedback, but also keep in mind that we have 
been looking at this for a long time and may get grouchy if the comments 
are overly critical :-)

But seriously, fresh input is very helpful when you have been looking at 
something for too long and could be missing some easy and obvious (to 
anyone but you) solution.

Seek3r

p.s. ceb and ralf deserve tremendous thanks for their work on this. In 
the end everyone will greatly benefit from their efforts.

address@hidden wrote:
> the index function of notes is now ported to work with class
> xslttemplates. the class uses xslt to create the html output. it is the
> other method, next to etemplates, we are testing right now.
> did someone look the etemplates version? any comments?
>
> grtx. Bettina [ceb]
>
> [have a lot of funk]
>
>
>
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