The Drip Wire :
Developer News
Reporting on The Droplets SDK -
a distributed GUI toolkit • component-based UIs • server side programming
|
April 17,
2001
|
Volume 1, Issue 1 |
|
What's New in Droplets 1.10?
Desktop Alerts Coming in MayDeveloper Tip We Welcome our New Partners Show Off Your Work Default buttons. Use the setEnterButton() method of Component to set default buttons within your application. Enhanced Firewall Support. The Droplets platform has improved it firewall tunneling support. Developers using the SDK require no additional programming to get through firewalls. Customizable Authentication. The UserManager interface allows you to write your own logic for authenticating users, no matter how your user names and passwords are stored. You can also customize the scheme used for encoding and encryption of passwords sent over the wire. A tutorial is included in the latest version of the SDK. Rich Text Component. API now supports output text areas with full control of text color, pitch, weight, and size. This week we welcome our newest development partners: Nexus Group Fry MultiMedia Grassroots Technology These talented partners are trained and ready to help you deploy either ready-made Droplets, or unique, custom Droplets for your specific company's needs and requirements. For further information please visit our Partnership Page We now offer hosting of 3rd party Droplets at My Droplets. We are currently evaluating droplets for our site. If you have created a Droplet and you would like us to host it as a free service, let us know. About Droplets Droplets is a software platform for server-based online applications featuring real-time capabilities, high security, massive scalability and thin bandwidth usage. Droplets provide a more functional, user-friendly interface to online applications, and can be shared and distributed via email, in a Web page, or dragged out of the browser to the desktop, and accessed like local software. |
As of May 1, Droplets will allow you to send spontaneous notifications to your users' desktops! Alerts can be delivered on the Windows System Tray and displayed as icons or popup windows. For example, the Droplets version of your live baseball scorecard application can pop up a baseball in the system tray for each home run as they happen. Our Droplets email application will alert you of new mail as you get it. I want to hear more about adding alerts to my applications. Building Windows at Runtime Sometimes you don't know what UI widgets need to appear in a window until runtime. In the Droplets platform, the first time your application instantiates each of its window classes, it builds a description of the components in the window and sends it to the client. As an optimization, it stores the description in a cache, keyed on the window class name. This eliminates the overhead of constructing the description and sending it to the client each time the window class is instantiated -- a major performance gain. As a consequence, when you use the same window class to create windows with different layouts, you need to provide a key other than the class name for the cache to use. You can accomplish this by overriding the getTypeName() method of the Window class: public class MyWindow extends Window { private static int windowNum = 0; protected String getTypeName() { windowNum++; return "w" + windowNum; } } The framework calls getTypeName() once on each new window object. By returning a different string each time, you are indicating that each window object has a different set of components. Of course, you may have only a few different layouts for all the windows of a class. By returning one of a fixed set of names, one per layout, you maximize the benefit of the cache. Questions? Suggest a tip |
We'll continue to make Droplets even better and tell you about it from time to time. Meanwhile, please give us your feedback and check back with us at http://www.droplets.com.
Best regards,
The Droplets Team
