Selective view rendering in Web Applications

Today – any desktop software is able to re-draw itself from a callback by operating system. However many Web Frameworks today do not keep track of objects and cannot selectively produce pieces of HTML code.

I believe that ability to have control over objects on HTML pages is very essential to have in the Framework. Here is why:

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Yin and Yang of modern PHP UI Frameworks

I came over this old question on StackOverflow: “Which PHP Framework will get me to a usable UI the fastest?” I couldn’t help but wonder, why people are not aware of all those other PHP UI frameworks? There are few, right? If you google for “php ui” you can find them. Those are more generally referred to as UI toolkits. But why those toolkits are not known in the mainstream?

Why there is a gap between UI toolkits and mainstream frameworks? If UI is Yin and backend is Yang – why can’t they co-exist?

Here is what I think..

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3.9.1 Released

Release of 3.9.1 brings us many bugfixes and enhancements. Grid is cleaned up but forms are also slightly changed.

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Grid Documentation

Grid is a powerful UI element used in almost any web application. Some frameworks decide not to implement them at all. Others rely on full-featured JavaScript implementation and only provide data source as requested. Agile Toolkit builds grids in HTML, then enhances them through JavaScript. JavaScript widget then communicates with back-end to perform additional features for the grid. This post will look more in-depth on what can you do with grids.

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Upcoming release 3.9.1

There are number of stability improvements and code clean ups happening in trunk. We are getting ready to release minor update for our stable branch 3.9. Some of the features:

• Ajax Form inline errors are back and working properly
• Grids are going to be married with atk4_grid and will support row reloading and other things
• Grid Inline editing is back!
• Improved compatibility with older projects
• … and more.

Tell me what would you like to see in upcoming release? Oh and meanwhile, we did our first public demonstration of Agile Toolkit 4:

http://files.agiletech.ie/atk-present.mov

We plan to wind-up our promotion as we are nearing closer to 4.0 release.

3.9 branched out..

With some up-coming changes in trunk, we have created a stable 3.9 branch. It is not an official release yet, but if you are using trunk, I recommend you to switch.

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Naming Resolution

Thanks for your feedback on “File Mapping” post. We respect your feedback and have decided on the basic set of rules regarding class naming.

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Ordering elements

In Agile Toolkit each object you add is inserted as a child to some other object. They end up in $object->elements array, however there is no easy way to rearrange it.

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How to select elements in a grid?

Let’s say you want user to be able and select multiple elements in a grid. This can’t be done directly, because grid is supposed to list elements, it shouldn’t be built to intact with it. However grid can be extended and joined with the functionality of the Form to do what’s required.

You can see a working example here: http://atk4.agiletech.ie/grid/selectable.html

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New Grid Column Types – "button" and "ask"

With the migration to jQuery (UI) we have received lot of new fancy functionality, but some of the old things stopped worked too. However old stuff is fixable, and if there is anything – please let me know by commenting and I’ll give it a fix.

This tip explains how you can add buttons to the grid. You can see working demo here:

http://atk4.agiletech.ie/grid_columns.html

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