Comments on: Visage Android – Cleaner APIs, Cleaner UIs

By: Gottfried Theimer

Gottfried Theimer — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 19:37:44 +0000

I have been wishing for an Android Visage very much but recently gave up hope almost entirely. Now this is very encouraging. Perhaps Visage on Android finally gets the developer interest that the JavaFX language deserved but never achieved. Very impressive.

By: pron

pron — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 13:14:16 +0000

The web-renderer is nice (perhaps for desktop apps, air-style), but it seems that when it comes to the web, the world is going the way of a plugin-free browser-page. Even flash is in peril. But a “headless” JVM applet that manipulates the DOM instead of Javascript may be appealing, especially if it could be written in a good language like Visage. A DOM API exists today (org.w3c.dom) and is available to applets, but it’s clunky to use from Java. It seems to me, that other than Android, this would be the best use of Visage as of now, and possibly even when JavaFX 2 arrives.

By: Nick Apperley

Nick Apperley — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 01:05:49 +0000

Just confirmed with the roadmap for JavaFX 2 that there will be a set of DOM APIs (in the JavaFX 2 beta)

– http://javafx.com/roadmap/#23

By: Nick Apperley

Nick Apperley — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 21:55:28 +0000

With the next iteration of JavaFX there may be a set of DOM APIs exposed (Java style), which Visage and other JVM languages can use. I am not entirely sure what the final plan for JavaFX 2 is on the web front. Although there is a web renderer as I understand it everything that is displayed is compiled to JavaScript unfortunately

By: pron

pron — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 19:05:15 +0000

Visage really is a great UI language. I would love to see it used in making web applications, as it is far superior to HTML+Javascript+CSS. As a first attempt, instead of compiling visage (or its emitted bytecode) down to to Javascript a-la GWT, what about wrapping the common DOM API (org.w3c.dom) as Visage controls?
This way a Visage applet could be used instead a an AJAX solution.

By: eduveks

eduveks — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 14:32:49 +0000

Great news! Congratz by effort!

I hope use it in short time. I loved work with JavaFX and for Android even better!

Great job and please keep going don’t stop!

By: Fernando Martines

Fernando Martines — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 09:53:23 +0000

Impressive work Steve! It is a great milestone for Visage. Thank you for keeping JavaFX alive, more than ever, by reaching the growing Android-based ecosystem.

By: steveonjava

steveonjava — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 04:08:40 +0000

The example here uses a runtime library in addition to the compiler. You can actually code the same thing without the runtime library in Visage, but it ends up looking (not surprisingly) a lot like the Java version. It is also possible to use the Visage delegate classes and native Android calls together (each delegate object has a public reference to the wrapped class).

The plan for distributing the runtime library is to make it an application on the Android store that you can have a dependency against. This will mean that the end user only has to install the Visage APIs once and every application that uses them will be able to take advantage of the same code.

The other distribution option is to include the subset of the runtime library files that you use by using a shrinker utility like ProGuard. This would allow you to keep your application size very small, only including the Visage classes that are actually in use.

I actually had the same idea about using a Map datatype for the entries/entryValues. That is on the roadmap for Visage, so when we get it implemented we will definitely make use of it in the APIs.

By: steveonjava

steveonjava — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 04:03:35 +0000

It is a combination of a compiler and a runtime library. I didn’t include the imports, but all of the classes referenced in the Visage example are delegate objects with hand-crafted APIs that are close to their original Android counterparts, but with some improvements to take advantage of Visage language features.

By: steveonjava

steveonjava — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 04:01:24 +0000

The original example with its 3 files was not localized either… you would have had to use a fourth Strings.xml file if you wanted to add localization.

For Visage the plan is to support localization using a similar mechanism to JavaFX. This includes a syntax like the following:
##”Filter By Status”

You would then add a properties file in to the same directory with the name “Settings_en.fxproperties” and the following contents:
“Filter By Status” = “Your localized string here”

This should meet the need and be much more developer friendly than Android localization technique. (e.g. No more Force Close messages when a localization file is missing a required string)