Just Play It Grand...

I’ve put up the beginnings of a PIM example.
What works, the menu, the contact/org list and the add functionality. What needs to be implemented is Edit/Delete. I’d also like to add a master/detail view.

You can get it by loading it up from Monticello with the following details.

MCHttpRepository
location: ‘http://justplayitgrand.com/mc/elhpim’
user: ”
password: ”

Load version ELHPIM-elh.7.

Then bring up a Workspace (if WAKom hasn’t already been started), type, ‘WAKom startOn:9093′, and perform a ‘Do It’.
Go to your Web browser and point it at, localhost:9093/seaside.
You’ll notice an app called PIM present.
Select it.

The main purpose of this example is to help shed light on how to create applications with a menu, and multiple pages. When I first started looking at Seaside, one of the first questions I had was, how do I navigate to another page? All the suggestions seemed to point to ‘call/answer’. So you play around with this for a while, but what you begin to realize is that this isn’t what you want. (Why? because you may be navigating to pages which you will never return from, or are completely independent of the previous page) Instead, what you’re looking for is the idea of rebuilding your component tree. In the PIM example, this is shown by navigating between Contacts and Organizations. What is essentially done is the Content view is changed. Just like in desktop development, you’re just switching in and out what view will be drawn. It’s just that simple.

Alot of times I view call/answer as a mechanism for a modal window/view. I know that doesn’t exactly hold, but in alot of ways I find it to be a good analogy. Like a Sheet in Mac OS X (but for an individual component rather than the entire window).

I just wanted to get this example up. I’ll post more entries discussing what I’ve done. Alot of it could be done better and I plan to improve the code to demonstrate where we started and what it can look like (which I believe will really show the power of Seaside). The more you play with Seaside, the more potential you see… the sky certainly is the limit (or rather your imagination I guess).

This is just a rough start to hopefully help those of you who were frustrated like myself. I’d like to get more stuff out incrementally then waiting until everything falls into place. I hope it helps people. Comments are certainly welcome, as I’m just grunting it out like the rest of you.

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