Re: A Case For Wonder/D2W (was: How would you handle such situation?)
Re: A Case For Wonder/D2W (was: How would you handle such situation?)
- Subject: Re: A Case For Wonder/D2W (was: How would you handle such situation?)
- From: John Bruce <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 21:13:14 +1000
On 8/4/05, Florijan Stamenkovic <email@hidden> wrote:
>
> So, I am not sure what sort of a construction you are talking about
> here. Where is the place for D2W in your projects?
I have two major WebObjects applications that I work on both of which
use D2W and Wonder. In one application almost all pages are created
by using D2W from about 5 templates. I have a lot of custom components
for handling certain business logic and interface elements. In my
second app I have taken out some D2W pages in favour of AJAX based
forms for some of the most used pages.
All my EO's inherit from ERXGenericRecord and all my EC's are based on
ERXEC. Basically I use Wonder stuff before creating something if I
can. It would just take way to long to do it all from scratch.
>Where does it cut the dev time short?
With D2W in about 5 mins you can create a new form for an entity with
good default behaviour and without writing any html. Sometimes you
need to create a custom component to handle editing an attribute a
certain way but the great thing is you just focus on creating that and
then write a rule and it's done.
For example I had to write a custom edit component to handle timezones
properly for my app so I created it and then wrote a rule that
replaced all of the date editing components with the new one. I didn't
have to edit all of the pages that used it all I had to do was write a
rule and it's done.
> Where can one look at all those advanced
> techniques, or does one has to read all the API and list archives to
> grasp yet another mechanism of WO that after a week of nightmares can
> be exploited to make one's life easier, or at least one's app better?
I found I had to do one thing at a time with D2W and especially Wonder
otherwise I got really confused.
Basically when you create a D2W app you will need to create your own
templates to use for the list /inspect/query pages as the default ones
don't look that nice. I've been meaning to create some good basic CSS
styled templates when I get some time...
Once you have your templates you can start creating pages and creating
your own components. D2W components are harder to make because you
want to make them as general as possible so you get the most benefit.
Practice helps with this.
> In short: is there a place to start, or are we talking about a pool of
> information that one has to jump in and will hopefully come out a
> better WO handler?
>
The Wrox book has some good stuff on D2W and the apple docs should get
you started. Also the articles on stepwise helped me too. With Wonder
it's a matter of taking on a bit at a time - well it was for me. Over
time I started to use more and more of the frameworks. The easiest way
to learn about it is to read the source and templates. When you're
trying to create rules looking at the Wonder and Apple rule files
helps - especially when you're looking for that undocumented key :)
D2W is worth it - it will save you time but it does take a while to
get your head around it.
Cheers,
John
BTW - just like to thank the Wonder team for all their work
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