[Sugar-devel] HTML activities

[lionel at olpc-france.org]

Hi Daniel,

Here my suggestions experimented on my own framework [1].


> 3 sugar-html-activity

In my opinion, it's the easy way to do.


> * Toolbar widget using the icons API, perhaps without palettes.

Yes but we should allow developers to use a true Python toolbar instead of
the simple one when needed.


> * Datastore saving and loading.

I've already implemented it in a simple API. With two methods: "save a
JavaScript object", "load a JavaScript object", we could probably cover 90%
of the need.


> * The rest of the UI widgets.

Not sure to see the interest to port the UI widgets. 
HTML activities will just draw their widgets using their own framework (or
standard HTML widget). 
Of course it will be visually different from Sugar widgets but I don't think
it’s an issue.


> * Should we be using existing js frameworks like jquery in the toolkit ot
limit ourselves to plain javascript.

There is plenty of JavaScript frameworks. We should allow to use any
framework to avoid losing a part of the JavaScript community.
My current work is based on the Enyo framework but could be adapted easily
to jQuery or to pure JavaScript.


* How do we limit access to the http server. Can one activity access the
files of another one?

No HTTP server need in a pure HTML activity.


> * Should we try to ease the transition from native to html activities,
allowing  for example to use native toolbars?

In my opinion, it's very important to allow developers to expand the
JavaScript code with Python code when need.


> I think this has a lot potential because it allows to run activities
pretty much everywhere (if nothing else inside a web browser). At the same
time it allows to support 
> services like datastore which are an essential part of the sugar
experience. Finally it gives powerful new tools to activity developers, HTML
being much more expressive 
> than gtk.

+1

		Lionel.

[1]
http://booki.flossmanuals.net/make-your-own-sugar-activities/_draft/_v/1.0/d
eveloping-sugar-activities-using-html5/