Phil Booth's blog

Recently, I've had the chance to spend time on some of the more presentational aspects of Sidewinder and this work has led to the addition of the Sidewinder Application Gallery to the installer. The purpose of the Application Gallery is to act as a showcase for the many different kinds of application that can run in Sidewinder.

This week I am making a start on bringing WebKit into LibRender, the rendering component of Sidewinder. When I'm finished, this will leave our reliance on Microsoft's XML parser as the last remaining hurdle before we can start porting Sidewinder to other platforms. The prospect of finally addressing these two tasks is something that I'm rather excited about.

Recently, we've had a number of enquiries about embedding formsPlayer inside third-party applications, as more people are realising the benefits of using XForms as a dynamic UI framework. Fortunately, formsPlayer exposes a set of COM interfaces explicitly for this purpose and a number of commercial solutions exist that are currently relying on them. With this in mind, I've posted a tutorial article to The Code Project, one of the leading .NET developer resources, which demonstrates integration of these interfaces in a simple C# browser-like application.

I've just finished implementing a new feature in the Sidewinder Viewer, which further simplifies the task of turning any web page into a desktop application. If invoked with a command line argument that specifies the document to load, the viewer now also checks the fragment identifier for the presence of a meta XPointer scheme. The expression associated with this scheme allows you to set a number of application-level properties, such as the window title, height, width, position and so on.

I've just written a new tutorial, describing how to write an XForms application that overlays data from a BBC Backstage feed onto a Google Map. The application is pretty short and straightforward, but it also provides a cogent illustration of the advantages that the XForms model can bring, even to non-XForms user interfaces.

One of our customers in the insurance industry recently required us to provide proper Tablet PC stylus support in formsPlayer. The latest version implements our first cut of this feature, allowing hand-written data entry into the XForms input, secret and textarea controls.

We've just added a new tutorial to the site, demonstrating some basic techniques which allow you to embed XHTML documents inside your .NET applications. They rely upon our Renderer COM component, which is installed as part of the Sidewinder Viewer. The first tutorial is very straightforward; in later ones we shall demonstrate more exciting features, such as event-based communication between the live document and your application.

The latest version of the Sidewinder Viewer provides more options for docking renderer windows from the JavaScript API. Notably, it is now possible to create Renderer objects as docked children of a larger Application object. This allows a user to close your entire application from a single top-level window and can also provide a more convenient grouping of related windows.

In the latest release of the Sidewinder Viewer, you are able to alter the colour scheme used in the Source View tab. The option is available in 'Preferences > Source View'.

We've just started developing a new sample for the Sidewinder Viewer which, among other things, demonstrates basic communication between a running script and the rendered document. The sample uses the Backpack web service, via its RESTful API, and is something that we shall continue to develop as the viewer becomes more powerful.

An important feature of formsPlayer 1.5 has been the development of richer form controls, implemented using XBL and SVG. The screenshot here shows a simple XForms output control styled to look like an LED display:

Google Calendar is a good example of an application that benefits from features of the Sidewinder Viewer, without the need for any changes to be made. Given particular calendars that you may have cause to refer to throughout your day, it is a simple task to invoke the viewer in such a way as to make your calendars readily available, yet also unobtrusive.

With the latest release of the Sidewinder Viewer, it is now possible to dock many windows to a single edge of the display. The requirement for this change really became apparent with the increased control over renderer objects from script, that was introduced in an earlier build of version 2.0.4. One of the things that this enables us to do is extend the Kool IM Sample so that individual message windows themselves may be slid on to and off from the display as necessary.