Comments on: Thoughts on a Web ToolKit

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 09:53:33 +0000

On Wit — It takes the approach of a Widget Toolkit, heavily mixing the presentation with the ‘business logic’, in my experience these type of toolkit designs end up not working so well. I prefer the separate template file, which contains all of your design — the code just sets some variables for it, ala ClearSilver or somewhat how Smarty works in PHP.

By: the_angry_angel

the_angry_angel — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 08:51:51 +0000

I know my opinion probably counts for very little, and my experience with C and C++ webkits is limited. However, I do prefer to work with the example style that Ryan gives.

That said, the http://jose.med.kuleuven.ac.be/wt/Home.fcg way of going about things seems to be quite cool on initial inspection, although a little higher level than I imagine you are aiming for…

Like Ryan says, you can always wrap a C API. Vice versa being rather more complex to do..for obvious reasons.

By: Garrett

Garrett — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 06:40:42 +0000

You already know my opinion on the C/C++ bit (C++ bad, or at least C++ not much better than C for the part you seem to want it to make easier for you), but as far as the callbacks + a runloop function versus requiring the user to do that, it seems like one can be built atop the other. If you provide the matching code, and let the user run their handlers manually, that leaves that open for them, but you can then build the rest on top of it. Although you should note that for things like fcgi the run loop part is kind of required…

By: Paul

Paul — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 23:27:33 +0000

Ya, I really want to capture some of the ‘magic’ that many of the newer kits like Ruby on Rails or Django do — it kind of can meke it difficult to use straight C for some of that magic.

I don’t want it to be so directly tied to an SQL DB/object marshling system as Django and RoR seem to be. That should be something you can build on top.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 23:11:45 +0000

Perhaps it should be C++. People are getting quite used to the Ruby on Rails or Django philosophy of doing things in an object oriented fashion. it would be slick to be able to inherit from a XMLRPC object and have it automatically know how to handle a post, and serialize the replies.

However, I like the modular approach with C. Something like:

app* app = new_app();
pwt *my_xmlrpc_pinger = pwt_new_xmlrpc(my_callback);
pwt_register_mount(app, "/ping", my_xmlrpc_pinger);
pwt_register_mount(app, "/ping/static_page", pwt_static_page("dummypage"));
pwt_run_app(app);

Even though the OS will cache the CGIs a C++ based web based application would use more memory than a C based API. Bad if there are a lot of CGIs. A good C library can always be wrapped into a C++ library. In summary, I'm on the fence. I am voting for the modular approach, whether that is in C or C++ I'm not sure.