Friday, December 14th, 2007
GWT Can Do Spinners?
Category: GWT, JavaScript
The widget uses projection geometry (a view point and calculating image size and position based on where lines pass through the z=0 plane) and a little bit of trigonometry for the circle. Also, zIndex is set based on an object’s z coordinate. At this stage the implementation definitely performs differently based on machine horsepower and browser platform. It performs pretty well on IE7 and Safari 3, less well on Firefox.
This is still a work in progress but Dietrich already has plans for adding DnD and setting up clickable elements. GWT developers should love this control. Check out the demo here.
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4 rating from 60 votes
seriously, a spin animation down to the basic it isn’t that hard.
The blog correctly identified this as “DHTML” but the demo page confusing calls it “AJAX” even though there isn’t any XHR in it.
Right Jordan. In addition, I don’t get why I’d need a serverside-framework to do something that looks like it can be done in pure JavaScript. And supposedly, adding a GWT wrapper to existing JS stuff is easy… so whats the point exactly? It doesn’t even stop when I hover it.
@bizsimon: Agreed. It’s just a matter of some basic trigonometry.
The Google Bible, Book of GWT, in the chapter on UI we find a verse about spinners…..Can I get an ‘Amen!’?!
….next time we’ll look at the Book of Knol [and learn more about Google's various quests for the grail].
@Jörn Zaefferer
Some people don’t know javascript? Check!. Subset of these know GWT? Check!
Yes, I too can’t figure out why this was needed.
last week, we actually just started toying around with something similar to simulate a funky magazine rack. tried to make it interactive (and reflective).
this is my first attempt at something like this, it’s still a little buggy, and i had to disable in safari last minute. spent a while trying to optimize the event handler (this thing is a cpu hog), and if anyone has any feedback on how to speed it up, i’d be much obliged. The Expander class is inline. need to clean it up for sure.
http://www.zimbio.com
thanks…
Something to note here is how far behind we are in comparison to the actionscript people. I’ve been a pretty hardcore javascript junkie now for about a year but I just moved to into Flash agency as their backend and architecture guy. Gotta tell ya the Flash people coding actionscript have been doing this kinda stuff for eons, and they do it much better. As much
as I despise most sites using Flash, it and Flex are light years ahead of us.