[fpc-pascal] TCgiApplication in cgiapp unit - mostly deprecated

[Lee Jenkins]

Marcos Douglas wrote:
> Hi Lee,
> 
>>
>> So I'm taking advantage of the extra time and refactoring the framework a
>> bit and implementing a DHTML UI layer now.  We looked at ExtJS as well as
>> YahooUI, OpenLaszlo and a few of the others and eventually decided on Dojo
>> javascript tookit, but different UI layers can be plugged in.  Heck, even an
>> LCL or fpGUI layer is feasible.
> 
> Your project is open source?
> I'm very interested about that. Do you use some "template engine" for UI?
> The tecnology WebBroker (old Delphi) had macros for replace in events
> like #name or #salary. That is very simply but very coupled. We had
> HTML code coupled with Pascal code. The designers could not easily
> change UI code because that.
> 

Yes, I had plans to release it open source when its ready for testing, probably 
within 3-4 weeks from now.

The idea of the framework is mainly based on Proxy pattern.  You build your gui 
within the server session, similar to how ExtPascal does it though with a more 
VCL/LCL kinds of model than ExtPascal.  however, note that it doesn't use 
VCL/LCL and is based non-gui objects like TInterfacedPersistent to avoid 
dependencies on Lazarus LCL or Delphi VCL.

My goals in its development has been to ensure that the framwork overall:

A) Not tied to any particular GUI front-end, they should be swappable.  I should 
be able to present my Model/Controller (or other business logic) in different 
UI's such as Flex, Silverlight, ExtJS, Dojo, OpenLaszlo, etc while still keeping 
95% of the code on the server.

B) Any server platform or protocol.  For instance, you should be able to deploy 
your application using what ever server protocol that is appropriate for the 
job.  So feasibly you should be able to deploy your server app to FastCGI, 
Apache Module, ISAPI or even a stand alone synapse based HTTP server like I am 
using for testing.

Think of it as using the client UI as a puppet, with the server telling the 
client what to display through a two-way event system.

Here is a short screencast of the framework using the Flex UI layer.  Note that 
its pretty old and the framework has come a long way since this screencast and 
as I said, I'm going through some refactoring now since I have to change some 
things for the customer anyway.

http://preview.tinyurl.com/18r

--
Warm Regards,

Lee