Web Apps/Controls

[Bodger]

I have been working in PHP off and on for a few years and like the
language.

I have been reading a little about frameworks and web controls and what
not.

I am interested in a more desktop look to a web application. Because I
can write some awesome code, but my web interfaces leave much to be
desired (web forms that look pretty vanilla). I have seen a few web
controls like a list box with alternating row colors and such but the
few www.freshmeat.net projects with PHP web controls have either been
in their infancy or do not work well with anything but IE.

I looked at the Horde framework, but there is 0 documentation, I do not
know even if there are nice web controls or not. Their website was
basically don't bother us we are busy. So I did not ask them.

I looked at PRADO but that requires PHP 5.0 so must be in it's infancy,
and I did not see any nice looking controls (or I missed them).

So here are my questions:

- What do you recommend for open source high visual quality web
controls (and or framework that supports high visual quality web
controls)?

- What would be cool is there would be some sort of definition language
like XML or resource files like in MS Visual Studio that describes the
screen layout placing the controls where I want them and the program
would present it to them in a nice manner on their web browser.
Am I asking too much?

Thanx

Bodger

[José Luis Ramírez]

Bodger wrote:

- What would be cool is there would be some sort of definition language like XML or resource files like in MS Visual Studio that describes the screen layout placing the controls where I want them and the program
would present it to them in a nice manner on their web browser.
Am I asking too much?

There IS something like that. It's called XUL, but it'll only work on
Mozilla based browsers.

If your developing an application were you can control the browser,
check out XUL.

As for a more compatible solution, JS/CSS can help you break out of the
"plain vanilla" syndrome.

[Manuel Lemos]

Hello,

on 01/06/2005 04:14 PM Bodger said the following:

- What do you recommend for open source high visual quality web
controls (and or framework that supports high visual quality web
controls)?
You may want to take a look at this very popular forms generation and
validation class. Besides the common HTML form inputs it lets you
compose forms with more complex inputs defined in external plug-in
classes that can extend the power of HTML forms up to provide advanced
features with enhanced client and server side interactions.

For instance it provides a plug-in for entering dates eventually
validated to fall within a time range. Here is a screenshot of the kind
of forms that can be generated:

http://download.freshmeat.net/screenshots/4170.gif

There is also a new plug-in named CAPTCHA to validate that the user
accessing a site is really a human and not a robot program hacking your
site. The plug-in is ready and is being documented to be released next
week, but you may see it in action in this page:

http://www.phpclasses.org/subscription.html

Many more plug-ins can be developed by anybody without changing the core
class, which is Open Source and is available here:

http://www.phpclasses.org/formsgeneration

- What would be cool is there would be some sort of definition language
like XML or resource files like in MS Visual Studio that describes the
screen layout placing the controls where I want them and the program
would present it to them in a nice manner on their web browser.
Am I asking too much?

You could do that but parsing XML at runtime to extract form definitions
is quite heavy and it is a needless task as you can define them in a
clear format in PHP code as well.

What is more common in PHP is to use for instance the Smarty template
compiler engine that lets you define HTML templates that can be
integrated in your applications without mixing the code and the
presentation.

The forms class above comes with a plug-in for the Smarty template
engine that lets you integrate its forms with the presentation template
without mixing them in your source code.

In case you do not want to use Smarty, the class also provides means to
use plain HTML with embedded PHP commands to define the form presentation.

--

Regards,
Manuel Lemos

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