{"id":65,"date":"2008-01-17T18:41:20","date_gmt":"2008-01-17T22:41:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/2008\/01\/17\/65\/"},"modified":"2008-01-20T03:24:09","modified_gmt":"2008-01-20T07:24:09","slug":"ui-development-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/2008\/01\/17\/65\/","title":{"rendered":"UI Development (2)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>For the sake of memory leak, I couldn&#8217;t tell the exact time but it should be around VB 5.0 timeframe, there\u00a0was a &#8220;new trend&#8221; in UI development, the HTML.\u00a0 Desktop applications embedded\u00a0HTML engine\u00a0to render their UI.\u00a0 The reasons that I could remember were:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It feels cool!<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s much easier to deal with i18n problems with HTML.<\/li>\n<li>The look-and-feel of the UI is no longer constrainted by Windows Control, and sometimes it&#8217;s easier than doing full customized GDI drawing by playing GIF tricks in HTML.<\/li>\n<li>One can seperate presentation from business logic in a cleaner and easier to understand ways.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The most popular way to do embedded HTML UI (till today) is to embed Internet Explorer via IWebBrowser2 COM interface.\u00a0 There are some additional benefits to do so:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>One can penertrate firewall and transmit data with backend servers by utilizing existing HTTP\/HTTPS functionality built in IE.<\/li>\n<li>By creating a desktop application, one can do something that can not be (easily) done by pure browser-based thin clients, such as drag-and-drop or fine grained printer control.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>However, as we all know, there are many drawbacks to embed IE in the application, such as carrying over the vulnerabilities of IE, memory\/resource consumption, crappy error handling in JavaScript, &#8230; etc.\u00a0 Many ISVs still choose to use this technique regardlessly because the benefits of using it are too huge to\u00a0trade-off.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>By the way, IE (or should I say, Microsoft) is not interested in supporting non-XML-based CSS.\u00a0 As a result, one is forced to use alternative ways to achieve things that could be done easily with CSS, which increases the complexity and maintenance cost of the program.\u00a0 Did I mention that JavaScript is super slow and super hard to debug?<\/p>\n<p>There are other choices of HTML rendering engines, such as Firefox Gecko, or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.terrainformatica.com\/htmlayout\/\"><font color=\"#339900\">HTMLayout<\/font><\/a>.\u00a0 Both engines provide better support for CSS.\u00a0 Maybe we will see more applications that are <a href=\"http:\/\/developer.mozilla.org\/en\/docs\/Gecko_Embedding_Basics\"><font color=\"#339900\">powered by Gecko<\/font><\/a> in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the sake of memory leak, I couldn&#8217;t tell the exact time but it should be around VB 5.0 timeframe, there\u00a0was a &#8220;new trend&#8221; in UI development, the HTML.\u00a0 Desktop applications embedded\u00a0HTML engine\u00a0to render their UI.\u00a0 The reasons that I could remember were: It feels cool! It&#8217;s much easier to deal with i18n problems with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,2,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.cchsu.com\/art-en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}