Omnis Weblib for Studio - why would you want it?

[Doug Easterbrook]

hi Ben:

what will the component do that activex ie cannot do?

a bunch of things, primarily:
- it uses chromium embedded so more compatibility with www2 standards than i.e ever could
- same code both platforms (mac and windows)
- code that works in the platform, also works on the web
- it will display any URL's, you-tube, javascript based tools,

downside -- it will respond to events --- but it is not scriptable using microsoft only stuff. 
upside of not being microsoft?   w3C standard and it won't break with every release of the windows operating system and/or release of the next version of the ie browser.


to me...  something that uses universal w3c standards is the right way to go.     plus, since it can run a lot of opensource javascript stuff --- its going to make things like making graphing and the ability to write externals much easier.

did I say externals?    absolutely ---  imagine ignoring the omnis external interface and writing something with a visual interface (or non visual if you want) in a scriptable language ---   that could run anything.    

Did I say graphing (http://raphaeljs.com) -- feed it your data and you can now have people view them both within omnis and on the web.    Raphaël uses the SVG W3C Recommendation and VML as a base for creating graphics. This means every graphical object you create is also a DOM object, so you can attach JavaScript event handlers or modify them later.   Being a DOM object means we can attach any events we want to it


Suppose you wanted to have an html editor --  those exist (look at http://ckeditor.com and I found that quickly).     no more custom external, just something that runs in a w3c standard browser window.   

what about drill down reports --  HTML is ideal for that.  

want to display html5 video with all the standard codecs?   cross platform web browser again...

is the cross platform, w3c standard, non microsoft centric which means you win.


thats where we are going with this and why its so exciting.    We are going to rewrite one of our externals in javascript ... so that it also runs on the web in a way that we can't otherwise.



Doug Easterbrook
Arts Management Systems Ltd.
mailto:doug at artsman.com
http://www.artsman.com
Phone (403) 536-1205    Fax (403) 536-1210

On Aug 29, 2014, at 10:00 AM, omnisdev-en-request at lists.omnis-dev.com wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I have been following this thread with interest and am excited and 
> grateful to those who have given their time to this project.
> 
> I am curious, from the persepective of the person who develops for 
> Windows rather than Mac clients.  And is using Studio 6.1.
> 
> What will this component do over and above using the ActiveX IE object.  
> Bi Directional calling of methods / passing paramaters to / from Omnis 
> and Javascript is something I am hoping will be possible...?  What other 
> goodies...?
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Ben