This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: What is WithStyle?
Feed Title: Michael Lucas-Smith
Feed URL: http://www.michaellucassmith.com/site.atom
Feed Description: Smalltalk and my misinterpretations of life
I've taken this from the website, but since there are plenty of people who read my blog now they are hopefully interested in my company and what we do there. Software WithStyle makes WithStyle. But what is WithStyle?
WithStyle
WithStyle is an XML rendering and editing platform build for VisualWorks Smalltalk. It drives presentation off CSS and can provide rich WYSIWYG editing features for directly modifying an XML document.
WithStyle can be used as a HTML or XML widget inside existing VisualWorks applications, or it can be deployed as a thin-client which can execute scripts or parcel's from a server URL. Alternatively, WithStyle can be delivered as a web browser plugin using VisualWorks's plugin support.
WithStyle is completely dynamic, allowing scripts or Smalltalk code to change any aspect of a viewed XML document and have the UI update accordingly.
WYWIWYG
Any XML vocabulary can be edited using the "Edit WithStyle" WYSIWYG editing technology. You may define CSS to explicity style your XML elements or, optionally provide some XSLT to convert the XML in to a presentable dialect such a XHTML for which default CSS is supplied. CSS may also be used to specify what parts of a document are editable.
Use XML-Schema to provide the rules for editing the XML's structure. XML-Translations are supported for providing human readable versions of XML element and attribute tag's (useful in menu's and dialog boxes)
The power and flexibility go on and on, all provided with standards.
Open
WithStyle is fully extensible in its support for existing web standards and emerging web standards.
WithStyle can provide fully functioning windows from XML definitions without the need to use locked in proprietary XML vocabularies.
Standards
WithStyle richly supports Web standards
for rendering content: XML, CSS, HTML, XSLT;
for dynamic applications: XML-Events, XML-Includes, DHTML/DXML;
for WYSIWYG editing: XML-Schema's, XML-Translations and XSLT Backmapping technology.
WithStyle is designed modularly so that simple applications take little effort and complex applications can draw on the power of all the above standards to achieve their desired result.
Future
That's what the website says and it is fairly close to the mark, but it does not discuss what WithStyle will be doing in the future. In the near future WithStyle will be 100% Pollock based instead of VisualWork's Wrappers framework.
Already some core parts of WithStyle use Pollock classes as super classes and as helpers. Also in the future will be blending Pollock XML with any other kind of XML, such as XHTML and XForms and so on and so forth. WithStyle has proven itself to be very adaptable at blending different kinds of XML's together using XML Namespaces, as the W3C had intended.
This will allow WithStyle to work as a WebUI. A thin client that can build UI's based on XML specifications and chat back to backends such as Smalltalk, .NET and Java using either direct HTTP calls or using Web Services. VisualWorks already has a rich Web Servers framework for us to leverage.
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