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A quick summation of facts about DomUI

Implementation language, supported browser, tools used

  • DomUI is mostly written in Java, with small parts of Typescript, Javascript and scss (sass).
  • It supports all standard modern browsers and Internet Explorer from version 10.
  • It uses generics as much as possible, and uses annotations where useful too
  • It uses a small Typescript part which is generic, and has some extra Javascript/typescript code to support complex components.
  • DomUI uses JQuery as the backing Javascript library for many functions.
  • A set of base libraries containing common Java functionality is part of DomUI, so that DomUI does not have a huge amount of dependencies

Core concepts

Screen manipulation: DomUI's DOM

  • DomUI screens build a browser-like DOM on the server, and manipulates that DOM to form the UI.
  • The DOM is sent as normal HTML to the browser at initial page load
  • But any change after that is sent as an optimal delta, a set of commands that send the changes made server-side to the equivalent DOM inside the browser client.
  • Since only delta's are sent DomUI is fast.
  • And since DOM manipulation is done on the server, in Java, it is easy, type safe and can directly communicate with whatever Java code is present.
  • This means: no need to write badly typed and error prone web services for the UI!

The last point is a large advantage over the current crop of Javascript based UI's. We try to use the 


DomUI integrates out of the box with Hibernate, from version 3.5.
Core Concepts
DomUI components and code prefer configuration over extension. This means that instead of creating a new class extending a DomUI class you just call setters on a DomUI class to configure it. Being able to configure programatically is crucial to have good support for metadata-driven code: you cannot programatically extend a class but you can easily configure from code.
We use configuration by exception as much as possible. All components behave as reasonable as possible and are fully styled.
To do this DomUI has a metadata layer that uses all available information to decide how to show and handle data. The layer uses existing info (JPA/Hibernate annotations etc) and can be extended.
DomUI is an AJAX UI.
DomUI uses optimal delta's to send AJAX updates as efficiently as possible.domui-letters.png
There is no XML "programming" involved in DomUI: most is just Java code.
It's very easy to create components or page fragments in DomUI. This makes it easy to build reusable and maintainable code.
Building an application
A full DomUI application consists of a web.xml containing a DomUI <filter> specification plus a set of Java classes as a webapp.
The Application class initializes the application, and defines the "root" DomUI page.
Pages are Java classes.
DomUI applications handle their state fully transparently.
Integration within an application, "Hybrids"
Creating a "hybrid" application, mixing DomUI and other display technologies, is not hard
It does require knowledge of DomUI's state management: the integration needs to make sure that DomUI pages are deleted from memory as soon as possible.
Accessing data
DomUI has an abstract and generic query interface, loosely modeled like Hibernate's Criteria, but without it's design flaws. By using this framework kludges like manually creating SQL are not needed in components that help with defining queries.
It supports Hibernate and plain JDBC/SQL as implementation for data retrieval. Other persistence frameworks can be added.
When using Hibernate, all data used in a form is retained in memory. This means that some care is needed for forms loading lots of data.
It also means that forms have no problems with multiple roundtrips to the server: on return everything is where it was, without serialization or detached status.
Which makes edit forms really simple: no models, no reloading, no serialization.
The QCriteria framework has been made as typeful as possible. This made it possible to create an Eclipse plugin which helps with checking QCriteria queries, and which does context lookup for class properties inside queries.
The DOM in DomUI
Pages are created as a HTML DOM (Document Object Model) represented as Java objects. These objects form a tree in server memory, and by manipulating and rendering that tree we can render an HTML UI on the browser
Once the DOM for a page has been sent (as HTML) to a browser all updates to that page will be sent as AJAX updates
Actions executed by the user, like pressing a button, are sent to the server. The action is handled by Java code (in this case an IClicked<T> handler) which effects the action. This action then modifies the server-side DOM tree (because the Java code for instance adds a new row, or adds an error message, or whatnot).
Changes made to the DOM are sent to the browser as a delta. This delta is generated conceptually by sending only the changes made to the tree. The OptimalDeltaBuilder is fast, and produces delta's that are as small as possible. For instance, if we delete 1000 rows of a 1001 row table it does not send 1000 "delete" commands but it sends a "delete" for the parent, then an "add" for the remaining row.
Since the delta is small, updating the page is fast: it uses hardly any bandwidth.
The UI is then created by creating a DOM that is a 1-on-1 match with the HTML that shows that UI. This means that some HTML knowledge is required from a developer.
One way to reduce the amount of "DOM code" to write is to use components. A component is a basic HTML entity that encapsulates complex structure and behavior.
Because components themselves are simply DOM nodes, they are very easy to write, using only Java. This is important because writing complex pages as a set of components make them easy to maintain and build!
Another way to reduce code is to use one of the provided builders, or to build your own. A builder is a class that helps you to create a certain UI, but which is not part of that UI. The most often used builders are the HorizontalFormBuilder and the TabularFormBuilder.
DomUI Layering: layer 0
DomUI is layered. Layer 0 is the core HTML layer.
This layer defines most of the core HTML tags, like Div, Table, TD etc
Each code tag node is either a NodeBase (cannot have children) or a NodeContainer (can have children).
These base nodes encapsulate all common behaviour, and handle all CSS styling. CSS properties are exposed as java class properties, and can be changed at will at runtime.
Layer 0 nodes do not have "extra" functionality; they are as close to the original HTML elements as possible.
Layer 0 elements are the "building blocks" for everything; they are used in components and usually to create the large scale structure of a form.
Layer 1
Layer 1 is the component layer.
This layer consists of components that are mostly constructed out of layer 0 nodes.
A component exposes behaviour and can be an input component
All DomUI input components are strongly typed, and always return their value in the appropriate Java type. For instance the Text<T> control is an html <input type="text"> component but can be used as Text<Integer>. In this case the getValue() call will return that Integer always (or null if the control is empty).
This makes conversion and validation a function of a control itself. The control uses the validator framework and converter framework to do the actual work. Most common conversions are predefined.

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