Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2008 - (Page 24)

Can Sexy be Easy? YES - and now Sexy can be FREE! Check out our NEW release: Servoy 4.0 is an Eclipse Plug-In with a FREE community edition! Download today at www.servoy.com/sexy What is Servoy? Here's an excerpt from a recent eWeek product review: “For those tired of maintaining separate code bases for Web and desktop applications, Servoy offers a way to consolidate those code bases and cut development time in half.” required text fields and drop-down menus that the SR page used. However, the layout of these forms on the iPhone’s screen looked like something you’d see on a desktop browser and not at all like an iPhone app. For the sake of consistency, Apple promotes the idea of having your web page resemble regular iPhone applications as much as possible. Oddly, the company doesn’t offer any framework to help you do this. Because I didn’t have the time or expertise to write such a framework, I did the next best thing—I did a Google search for one. It turns out that there are several: the iPhone UI (iUI), originally written by Joe Hewitt and now maintained by Google code (code .google.com/p/iui), the iPhone UI Universal Kit written by Diego Lafuente (www.minid .net/iphone), and WebApp.Net, written by Chris Apers (webapp.net.free.fr). I chose iUI because it’s fairly simple, and its creator wrote Firebug, a FireFox add-on that lets you debug Javascript code in the browser (www.ddj.com/architect/196802787). Framework Features The iUI framework consists of a mixture of CSS styles and Javascript functions. These provide a set of style selectors that you apply to your page’s HTML elements. The framework then uses Javascript to manipulate the page’s document tree to modify its look. The appearance and behavior of these modified elements mimics that of the iPhone UI. For example, an ordered list of hyperlinks becomes the familiar iPhone list with arrows used to jump to other pages of a program. There are style selectors for setting up a navigation bar, lists, and hyperlinked lists of information. Other styles help construct panels that contain controls, display information, or provide buttons. Other iUI features that assist you with writing iPhone web pages are: • Visual feedback. Some elements flash briefly with the same blue color as the iPhone UI, thus verifying that the element has responded to the user’s tap. • Conserve screen space. At the top of an iPhone web page is a bar that displays the page’s URL. This URL text field bar consumes a precious 60 pixels of vertical screen real estate. You can temporarily hide the URL by invoking this code: 24 Dr. Dobb’s Journal l www.ddj.com l November 2008 http://www.servoy.com/sexy http://code.google.com/p/iui http://code.google.com/p/iui http://www.www.minid.net/iphone http://www.WebApp.Net http://www.www.minid.net/iphone http://webapp.net.free.fr http://www.servoy.com/sexy http://www.ddj.com/architect/196802787 http://www.accusoft.com/ddj http://www.accusoft.com/ddj http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2008 Contents Friday Night Fish Fry Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer's Notebook Saving Open Source Conversations iPhone Building Your Own Web Server Green Telnet What's New In Boost Threads? Testing Service Oriented Architectures Test Case Generation, UML, and Eclipse Unit Testing Web Services C3 Programming The Agile Edge Swaine's Flames Effective Concurrency

Dr. Dobb's Journal - November 2008

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