Ajax for the Real World

As the first of more to come, we’ve created a video tour of the SmartClient Visual Builder tool.  The video shows you how to use Visual Builder to create a web application without writing any code.  The tool can be used by business analysts and semi-technical folks to create working prototypes or by developers just learning SmartClient to create simple applications.

Watch the video to see the drag and drop screen building and event wiring in action.  You’ll also learn about data binding made simple with the DataSource wizard.

Visual Builder was built using SmartClient, so it’s a web page that doesn’t require installation and is easy to share  within a team.  It’s a great tool for teams collaborating to create working prototypes of SmartClient applications.  The best part is that the code created by Visual Builder is clean and can be used by developers to further enrich using the entire SmartClient framework - that means the end of throwaway prototypes.

Visual Builder is extensible so developers can extend it with connectors to any kind of enterprise data provider and any kind of custom component that can be built in SmartClient - even third party controls.  Custom components can then be used to build your screens with drag and drop - just as easy as the out of the box components.

Learn more about Visual Builder - watch the video here.   We’d love to hear your feedback on the video, as well as, get requests for future video topics.

Just came across this great blog post from SmartClient user David Johnson about a technique for loading required DataSources dynamically as part of a view.

“So how do we provide DataSources customized for the user? Well, we could easily pull the metadata from the database, merge in the user’s security and then write the DataSources into the web page (we are using ASP.Net).
…
As there will ultimately be around 200 DataSources in the application the time to build every one of them at login time was considered too long.”

The post goes on to describe a custom class, similar to ViewLoader, that handles automatic DataSource loading as part of a transition to a new set of application views.  Usage ultimately look like this, where the viewClass provides a list of DataSources that it requires in order to function:

_rightPane.addTab({
     ID: tabId,
     title: name,
     canClose: true,
     pane: ViewDependencyLoader.create({
         autoDraw: false,
         viewClass: className
     })
});

Great stuff, and David shares the complete source to his solution.

This is also an area where SmartClient will be expanding in the future, with APIs designed to help you more easily load a view along with the data it will need to initially operate, as well as manage a pool of views, for very large applications where LRU (least recently used) or similar view management approaches become important.