New widget set : Web Application mode

[Almindor]

I tried morfik, and I agree, altough their javascript side is horrible (half of the stuff just doesn't work or is too slow). But I too think that this hybrid approach is generally best. Too bad they're closed tho.

[Marc]

have you ever tried to browse the Morfik website with a not to recent PC ?
Click......nothing happening......no indication of something loading.....click......ow....something is happening.....
....D.....I clicked twice.

[bee]

That's some of the risk of using Ajax. No, I meant we could "steal" Morfik's idea to implement our own web widget. I didn't mean that we should use Morfik.

[bee]

Finally, there's somebody that start doing an action on this. Now there's an open source project name ExtPascal. As the name implies, it's trying to make a framework for web programming utilizing pascal language and extjs for the UI presentation.

Author of project (wanderlan) seems to have a similar idea as mine that I described above. Besides providing a pascal wrapper for extjs, extpascal also offers a unit for FastCGI application. It doesn't make its own web server as most people much prefer to use stable and proven available web servers i.e. Apache, Lighttpd, etc instead of using custom web server. However, extpascal doesn't prevent us to use our custom web server as long as it supports CGI or FastCGI protocol. The interesting part of the FCGI unit is it also works on standard CGI hosting by using so-called CGI gateway trick.

So far, the project is going well and being actively developed. If other people would like to join in this project and help contributing features i.e. pascal to js compiler, gui designer, or even build a web widget on top of it, is highly appreciated.

-Bee-

[Paul Ishenin]

Nice. I thought about extjs as one of possible widgetset but cannot imagine how to do that

[bee]

I'm playing around with extpascal for the last few weeks, helping the project a bit by reporting bugs and suggesting ideas. The nice thing with extpascal and its FCGI unit is, the programming paradigm is like we're developing a desktop app using Lazarus or Delphi. Well, not in truly exact way, but not that different as we're using PHP or powtils.

Be carefull with the license, though. ExtJS is like Qt, they ask for money if you make a commercial app using their tool. Nothing to be worried if you make an open source freeware project.

[bee]

Just to spread a good news.

ExtPascal project have been nicely going and got more interest and attention from other pascal developers. Some of the contributors had done an .dfm/.lfm file converter into ExtJS window and controls. You may see the demo here: htttp://195.216.196.161:6464/
They all there are converted from plain Delphi application. Though they're not yet all completed, they do show a very nice progress and great possibility in the future.

I hope this good news would get more pascal developers interest to be involved in this promising project. It's not impossible someday that we would have a true web widgetset support in Lazarus.

This project is more than welcome to new users and contributors.

[LazaruX]

Hey, what a coincidence, I was just thinking about opening a discussion like this,...probably somebody read into my mind and was faster...
I will try to use PSP and see...

[bee]

News update... the .dfm/.lfm converter demo is moved to http://reidspace.co.uk:6464/

> I will try to use PSP and see

What PSP do you mean? Powtils? If so, Powtils is an CGI API for pascal. It doesn't offer something like web widget. It's good for classic style web programming, I mean you still handle all HTML/JS/CSS by yourself.

What I'm talking about here is ExtPascal which offer something more advanced. It works using FCGI mechanism which somehow has better performance compare to plain CGI. It also wraps an advanced JS framework (ExtJS) which frees you from HTML/JS/CSS since it's handled by the JS framework.

[Arminius]

Yeah that would be great! PHP in pascal 

[bee]

> Yeah that would be great! PHP in pascal

No, it's never intended to create PHP code from pascal. We want to create web application using pascal.

Just to let people know... ExtPascal project has another new tool created by the community. Now we could create window-based web application using ExtJS controls utilizing ExtPascal from within Lazarus IDE. The work is still in alpha stage, there are still lots of things need to be done first before it would be really usable.

Anyone who want to join this project is more than welcomed.

[Lord_ZealoN]

Sorry for not post my last post here, but I thought this post was abandoned.

If I do a commercial app using extPascal, I need to pay, because I'm using extJS for a commercial application too, is this correct?

Cheers.

[Marc_G]

There is a new developement on the way (and it supports Linux and FreePascal ).

http://www.raudus.com/

It's similar (also binded to ExtJS) but different than ExtPascal. I think this framework makes modifications to ExtJS library, and this makes it better integrated to Delphi IDE's and robust. But at the moment only applies to a few controls (more are coming).

Worthwhile to take a glance at their demo video.

http://www.raudus.com/custom/demos/01-sum/01-sum.html

Looks very promising.

[bee]

http://www.raudus.com/

I'm not interested since it's not open source. It seems it will go commercial by version 1.0, I believe. Nothing wrong with commercial as long as it open the source code. So, I stick with ExtPascal.

[Marc_G]

Sorry for not post my last post here, but I thought this post was abandoned.

If I do a commercial app using extPascal, I need to pay, because I'm using extJS for a commercial application too, is this correct?

Cheers.

Yes, it seems you have to pay a commercial license for ExtJS.