[Lazarus] GUI development for web UI

[Lee Jenkins]

On 11/24/2010 4:21 AM, michael.vancanneyt at wisa.be wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, 24 Nov 2010, ik wrote:
>
>> Hello List,
>>
>> Well I know about the framework fur Javascript library in Lazarus, but I'm
>> thinking in the past year or so, what will it take to design a gui
>> application using Lazarus, and make it work like a web app that act the same
>> as the desktop version, without any specific components for it.
>>
>> Then today I found the following link:
>> http://blogs.gnome.org/alexl/2010/11/23/gtk3-vs-html5/ and it looks like
>> someone made something like that on GTK3.
>> The problem is that I do not have the time to do it myself (or I would have
>> created at least the start for it), what will it take to create something
>> like that for Lazarus that is not dependent on the widgets (it will not care
>> if it's GTK, Qt, WinAPI etc..), and take also 3rd party components for it ?
>
> You should first answer the question this man asks:
>
> "Now, I want to know, Is this useful?"
>
> The answer IMHO is: no.
>
> Each and every GUI or user action/change/whatnot will result in a request from
> the browser to the webserver (with corresponding result sent back), and will
> cause a lot of traffic.
>
> While this is fine and doable for small apps, it is not scalable at all. If 100
> users use your system, it will crash under the load (if not earlier).
>
> More to the point would be the morfik approach:
> - Design and code your app as you do now.
> - Translate the lot to Javascript+HTML+CSS
> Because then, the browser does all the GUI work, and only when necessary (get
> data from server or store data on server) does the server get a request.
>
> I am building all blocks for the latter approach, but it is slow progress.
>

I started a framework like that in question, actually had a decent working 
prototype that used Adob Flex as the front end.  The problem is as you explained 
in that there is a tremendous amount of traffic for all of that user I/O that 
must be tracked for every click, etc.

My customer got spooked when Apple decided not support Flash and later 
disallowing non-native apps (since retracted?) and we opted for a different 
direction using lazarus/fpc on the server providing a remote data Model and left 
it up to the client (in this case HTML5) to create and implement its own 
Controller and View.  In our case, we created the client web app with dojo. 
This was a much better solution in the end.

--
Warm Regards,

Lee