Re: Creating rich interfaces for web applications??

Geoff Caplan wrote:

Hi folks I have been looking for a practical way to create rich dynamic forms in the client using PHP, and would appreciate any pointers to workable approaches. With the launch of .Net I suspect that customer expectations are going to change, and good old plain HTML will begin to look dated.

I am thinking of client-side functionality such as lists that can sort and filter, cascading dropdowns, drag and drop, validation in the client that is double-checked on the server etc etc. I am doing quite large and complex applications, so there is no way to code the client side stuff by hand - I need some kind of dynamic library. This is for intranet use, so I will be able to specifiy the browser verion to be used, and any plugins required.

If you don't want to use HTML/CSS and are not bound to use a webbrowser, you could try to use PHP-GTK - it lets you build GUI's very quickly and easily, and works on Win and UNix machines, the Data Processing can be done in the same way you always did when coding PHP. It is in an early stage, but there are already some interesting applications, as a Mail Client and an editor. look at http://gtk.php.net and subscribe to the Mailing Lists there if you run into problems.

There seem to be all kinds of technologies emerging, but most of them are either too immature, too slow (such as Flash based solutions - see www.carels.com), or are based on Java. For all its shorcomings, some kind of XML/DHTML solution seems best, and I guess it will improve as Browsers catch up with CSS2.

hmm, my experience with JavaScript is not much better than with Java - both are error prone, lead to browser crashes, and are slow or just don't work, if things get real comlicated and beyond "displaying a page with some text and links and rollovers".

I have spotted a very nice Java/Tomcat solution, for example (see isomorphic.com), which shows what can be done. But the only DHTML/PHP library I can find is dynapi, which looks promising but is still a bit limited so far as functionality goes and the documentation is kinda thin.

aehm, above you are talking client-side, now here Java/Tomcat /PHP, it's all server side... what is your _real_ problem? Creating Lists and all that sort of things which are easily to program and maintain for developers - either client or server side, or what? Are you just looking for a library that helps you to build forms and things like that dynamically? henning