Carla Mott's Blog

June 2007 Archives

New Update fetaure in jMaki NetBeans plugin

The jMaki NetBeans plugin now has an update feature which automatically updates the version of jMaki that is included in your app. This means that the appropriate files are copied from the new release of jMaki into your application so you don't have to do it yourself. As part of the update, the entire resources directory structure that is part of your application is copied into a resources.zip just in case you made a change to one of the jMaki files. Only the files under the resource directory are updated. None of the application files are touched.

The steps for updating your application are pretty easy.

1. Right click on the project you want to update and select Properties.

   

2. Select Frameworks from the left nav bar.
3. Click on Update jMaki resources

   

4. When the update is complete, click OK

   That's it! Although you are told to back up the resources directory the update feature will do that for you. You will get a dialog with the location of the zip file that was created from your project in case you need to retrieve the old files in the resource dir.

   One thing to note is that the current update feature does copy in only the libraries that already exist in your application, however, it will copy in the entire toolkit library. For example, if your application includes a Yahoo menu widget, once updated it will contain all the files that are part of the Yahoo toolkit and the wrappers for those widgets. This means that the applications size may be a little bit bigger than before the update. If size is an issue you can go into the resources directory and manually prune the unused files.

   Updating to a new version of jMaki is now alot easier with the update feature. Thanks to Ludo for providing it!
   
   

   jMaki .9.3 release available

   Posted by carlavmott on June 11, 2007 at 01:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
   
   

   We just released jMaki .9.3 which contains a few bug fixes including one for the Flickr wrapper to access Flickr, changes to the Dojo editor wrapper and the initial release of the extension mechanism which allows behavior/functionality that are shared among widgets. See Greg's write up on extensions for more information.
   
   

   Making jMaki service arg consistent

   Posted by carlavmott on June 11, 2007 at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
   
   

   We are going through the jMaki widget wrappers making sure that they all are consistent in how they support the 'service' arg. The 'service' arg is used to provide data for the widget where the data is from an external source. This means that a URL is provided to the 'service' arg. In many samples, we specify a JSP which contains the data. This is purely for convenience as the URL can also point to a servlet or other Java EE component.

   Previously the Dojo Editor wrapper used the service arg to provide a URL to a servlet which would be called on an onSave event and was expected to handle saving the contents of the editor data. While this is useful it is inconsistent with the way other widgets use the 'service' arg. In the interest of consistency and simplifying the programming model, I changed the editor wrapper so that the 'service' arg now provides data to the widget. This means that the web developer can load the editor with an existing document which can then be edited using the 'service' arg. For example,

    <a:widget name="dojo.editor"  service="/data.jsp"/>
   

   In this case, the contents of the editor when rendered comes from data.jsp.

   But we still want to get the data from the editor for and save it. No worries. This can be done through the Glue code. See the getwidgetdata sample for an example of getting the contents of the editor. The sample also shows how to send the data back to a servlet for further processing.
   
   
   

   This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
   
   
   
   Powered by
   Movable Type 3.01D