Monday, July 24, 2006

See A Need, Fill A Need

The title refers to the animated movie Robots. In the movie Rodney, a robot with aspirations, goes to the big city to become an inventor. His motto is "see a need, fill a need". I have been trying to do the same thing with the GWT Widget Library, trying to fill the need where I know there is one. Based on some polling a few weeks ago the biggest need is for more widgets. 68% of those polled asked for more widgets above all else. With those results I started to focus my efforts on just widgets, and with some help from people like Adam Tacy, we have introduced quite a few in the last couple versions.

The question I want to ask is, what other widgets do you want to see added to the GWT-WL?

Please let us know what you want us to build, we need some more ideas. Leave a comment below and we will add it to the wish list.

Thanks.

26 comments:

Anonymous said...

A sortable table with the ability to specify values for the elements. Although it already exists alone, having it apart of the library would be nice.

Anonymous said...

LightboxWidget (extends Popup or Dialog?)

Anonymous said...

Sprites. Previously I have used the gamelib library with DWR, but having trouble integrating with GWT. Also had a look at animagix.

Anonymous said...

A CheckboxTree: Tree with checkboxes. I mean, a tree of elements that when you check the checkbox of a parent element
all the children elements are checked automatically.

Also, a CheckboxTable would be as useful.

Anonymous said...

Another vote for a sortable table.

Anonymous said...

Please add another vote to the CheckBox tree widget request

Robert Hanson said...

Thanks for the comments, please keep them coming.

Anonymous said...

I know it's asking a lot, but a rich text editor widget would be nice. One that uses the toolkit more than JSNI, so that it would work in IE, Firefox and Safari.

Anonymous said...

I would like a scrollable, zoomable, clickable, hexmap window widget for implementing online games.

it would work like this:
1) have its on window viewport on screen
2) have a zoom function
3) have scrollbars to move the viewport around the map
4) populate the hex areas on the fly. i.e. if user zooms out or moves left, server would be queried for the contents of the hexes thus revealed. perhaps SVG would be the go here?
5) generates left and right hex-click events
6) has a 'highlight' hex function. anyhex, any colour

tryand have this ready by next wednesday plase ;)

Anonymous said...

A rollover state for ImageButton. I know set url throws the runtime exception, but maybe have a rollover image button that doesn't use PNGImage?

Anonymous said...

Oh, and alt text of images would be cool too.

Anonymous said...

A dock panel with movable splitter is needed!

Anonymous said...

I second the call for a sortable table and rich text editor. Both of these would be great additions to this toolkit :)

Anonymous said...

Decent dockpanel with tabs, in the Eclipse UI (and to a lesser Firefox) style...

Anonymous said...

1) site navigation string with dividers like "/" or ">".

directory/subdirectory/subsubdirectory...

2) +1 to checkbox tree,"a tree of elements that when you check the checkbox of a parent element
all the children elements are checked automatically."

but it would be better if I can regulate whether to launch click listeners of clicked tree node or its sub nodes or both. Or more complex regulation: check on every node whether it passes event launching to sub nodes or not.

I am also need in increase of number of events of widgets: Different mouse buttons clicks, scroll support, double clicks(!), triple... etc clicks.

Anonymous said...

I posted an idea at

http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit/browse_thread/thread/8dfae9e5349d46dc/a9b307bb4c83f589?lnk=gst&q=generic+servlet&rnum=1#a9b307bb4c83f589

for creating a generic servlet capable to be extended to call dinamically other services, for example, Spring.

If you want, I can modify the source code and send the modifications to you (it would be better if RemoteServiceServlet were designed to be extensible)

Anonymous said...

Do you take contributions? I have just completed a ProgressBar widget but have nowhere to put it for other people to download. If yes, how do I go about getting it to you?

Robert Hanson said...

Bjarne, yes, I definatley accept donations/help. Shoot me an email at iamroberthanson AT gmail.com.

BTW - For those interested, there should also be a Lightbox component in the next release, from Brian Glick.

Anonymous said...

A button which can be placed within html form and change it's state from simple button to submit button and backwards.

I.e that widget would behave itself as Button, but also can behave itself as html submit input tag.

It will be cool if in "submit mode" this button will lauch listeners before it submits form.

Anonymous said...

1 more vote for a clickable hexmap. As a simple start: a button widget that can display a polygon shape (e.g. a hexagon) and some interior color/graphics/image (perhaps using SVG), including a clicklistener that can say whether the user clicked inside or outside of the hexagon. Is this easy to implement?

Anonymous said...

The widgets-library allows us to get parameters from the query string using WindowUtils.Location. Setting the query string seems to not be allowed (the source says it is a protected function). Would it be possible to somehow do this? Would be useful to update the url and query string, so that the user could bookmark certain states of the app.

Robert Hanson said...

> Setting the query string seems
> to not be allowed

You can't alter the string that is displayed in the URL bar of the browser without loading a different page.

Take a look at how other sites, like Google Maps use permalinks as an example of how you might implement it.

Robert Hanson said...

> 1 more vote for a clickable hexmap. > ...perhaps using SVG...
> Is this easy to implement?

Yes, it is probably easy to implement, it would just take some time. It sounds like a cool idea, it is just that I don't have the time right now.

I have some old hex map code that I wrote a year ago that I can use as a starting point when I finally find some time to do this.

Anonymous said...
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Russell Allen said...

I would love to see a library that provides a 'panels' layout, just like Eclipse.

Each 'panel' could load content from a separate url or have embedded content.

From there the user can drag a panel to the top, bottom, left or right - splitting that panel in the process. Or the user could drag a panel to the center creating a tabbed panel set. Panel edges can be dragged to resize the panel. etc. etc. etc.

Ultimately, mimic the layout concept (perspectives and views) that we see in Eclipse.

Anonymous said...
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