[ZODB-Dev] Pre-announce: Oscar 0.1

[Michel Pelletier]

On Tue, 9 Oct 2001 14:54:16 -0400
 Greg Ward <gward@mems-exchange.org> wrote:
> On 09 October 2001, Christian Robottom Reis said:
> > I keep having these flashbacks.
> 
> [me, from 4 Sep 2001]
> > Philosophy: the UI should constrain the user as much as it can to make
> > sure they enter the right stuff.  The code that does that constraining
> > should be as close to the user as possible, in order to make error
> > reports as useful to the user as possible.  Since our application is a
> > web application, we have classes corresponding to all the major
> > "widgets" you can have in an HTML form.  We subclass those for
> > type-related constraints, eg. a string input box that requires integers.
> > Some widgets are inherently value-constrained -- eg. radio buttons and
> > select lists -- so our widget classes let you specify a constraint.
> > Others are inherently unconstrained (text areas, string entry, or string
> > entry that only accepts integers), and our widget classes leave them
> > as-is.
> 
> For the record, this web widget framework is now avaiable as the Quixote
> Form Library.  Download Quixote 0.4 and check out the "form/"
> subdirectory (aka the 'quixote.form' package).  No docs yet.  This is a
> pretty nice way of churning out lots of web UI where you're more
> concerned with a consistent, intelligent interface than with fancy
> graphic design.

You might want to check out Martijn Fassen's Formulator for Zope, which also has some great stuff in it along these lines.  I'd love to see a common web widget library.  I've championed putting Formulator in Zope before, I think it's a sad usability loss.  Maybe now that we have community CVS write, Martijn will be inspired.

-michel