neyric’s Javascript

I made a few updates this week-end. They mostly concern the Container
and Layer classes.

Here are the changes:

• new Layer.getWiring function to save the state of the wiring. It
  can be customized by overriding Container.getConfig
• jsBox updated to use the Layer.getWiring function
• no default width for containers so they can auto-adjust to the
  content
• Layer.addContainer and Layer.addWire now returns the created
  instance
• Added the method Container.redrawAllWires and
  Terminal.redrawAllWires
• Added Layer.removeAllContainers
• adds a “body” div to the container
• CSS updates on Containers and Layers
• adds a focus CSS class on the last mousedown-ed container in the
  layer
• bugfixes (events “addWire” and “removeWire” added to WireIt.Layer,
  offset in the connections)

I just released the new 0.2.0 version. You can download it here.

Here are the main changes:

• 2 new classes were added: WireIt.Container and WireIt.Layer
  Every project you might start using WireIt needs a widget that could contain Terminals, and that could be moved around. This is the goal of WireIt.Container.
  The Layer class creates a DIV element that can contain multiple containers and wires. It will be useful to save the state of the containers and connections between the terminals. (It also provide an extensible frame with scrollbars.)
• Custom events added to create richer interactions when editing the wires.
• A minified version built with YUI Compressor.
  This javascript minifier is almost perfect: I just wish you could have multiple input files…
  The result file is just below 20k.
• jsBox: This is a sample application using WireIt.
  Create boxes containing javascript functions, connect them together, and run your program !
• Many new configuration options, configurable CSS class names, and some new methods in the Wire and Terminals classes.

Don’t forget to give your feedback in the forum !

Have fun !

The google gears team recently announced the features that will be added in gears 0.3

One of them particularly caught my eyes: the Desktop API. It provides a simple method that lets you create a shortcut icon on the user desktop, to launch your web application. Is’s particularly interesting for an offline-enabled web application, and improves the user experience while making web applications one step closer to Rich Desktop Applications.

However, google doesn’t provide the 0.3.2.0 version yet. If you want to try it, you’ll have to compile it yourself from the gears svn version. (There’s a tutorial to build it under windows, for MacOS, a simple “make” will work)

As the compilation procedure was not so straightforward under windows, here are the xpi files (firefox only) from the latest svn revision (revision 638) :

• gears-osx-opt-0.3.2.0.xpi (Mac OS X)
• gears-win32-opt-0.3.2.0.xpi (Windows)

Once you’ve installed it, you can try this snippet : (it won’t work unless you change the icon urls to REAL icon files)

var desktop = google.gears.factory.create('beta.desktop');
desktop.createShortcut("Test Application",
       "An application at http://www.test.com/index.html",
       "http://www.test.com/index.html",
      {"16x16": "http://www.test.com/icon16x16.png",
       "32x32": "http://www.test.com/icon32x32.png",
       "48x48": "http://www.test.com/icon48x48.png",
       "128x128": "http://www.test.com/icon128x128.png"});

I’m now impatient to be able to launch firefox without the browser chrome (like Prism) ! I think I’ll have to wait for Firefox 3