I need your help to check if I got it right:
- In the past, in Dojo 0.4.x we had the FloatingPane and Taskbar widgets which allowed us to build a quite good cross-browser windows system.
- Today, in Dijit we have only a modal floating pane.
- And in DojoX we have an experimental resizable and dockable FloatingPane which it seems to me working worse than the 0.4 one, especially if run in IE (7) where it has buggy behaviours (I checked the test file on archive.dojotoolkit.org).
Giving this situation I wonder why I should bother myself upgrading my webapp from 0.4 to 1.0 given the fact that my app layout strongly relies on the dojo-0.4-based windows system. Actually it seems that my windows system is just un-portable (I mean, if one wants to keep a production quality level).
This is why we all love Dojo, because you won't lack surprises!
Giovanni
well at least your attitude
well at least your attitude towards the surprises is good :)
You are more than welcome to sign a CLA and port taskbar. I have an open thread in dojox forums trying to get a dojox.desktop project together from contributors like yourself. I simply don't have the spare time :( I re-wrote FloatingPane to be 'much more simple' because in the beginnings of 0.9 there was a serious cry of foul about the removal of FloatingPane from dijit/dojo ... It was just 'thrown' there (i don't actually use it anywhere, i did it for "you") hoping that the people using could expose some bugs and features they want.
Feel free to jump in ... All the tools are there for you to make an OS inside a browser of sorts, but it's not the immediate goal of dojo to do (or dijit) ... Which is why i proposed the dojox.desktop project for _just_ that kind of thing.
thanks for your reply which
thanks for your reply which is perfectly clear and honest!
I fear that I don't have both the time and the skills to potentially count myself as a contributor of the dojox.desktop project, at least for now or for the nearest future.
It's also good to understand, as you state, that building an OS inside the browser is not the goal of Dojo.
Actually my app is a traditional one (I mean a webapp, not a browser-based OS), we just chose the OS-like interface as an intuitive way to manage objects on the page. But it would be possible to replace the OS-like paradigm with another one without throwing away all the dojo and custom widgets which are rendered as childs of each FloatingPane widget.
Now my problem is what to choose: keep working with 0.4 and the OS-like paradigm, or make the upgrade to dojo/dijit 1.0 re-thinking the FloatingPanes/Taskbar part (just because I can't wait the dojox.project being completed). Of course if I upgrade I have to port not only the OS-like part but everything included some 30 or more custom widgets.
Thanks again,
giovanni