The great Nikhil Kothari leads the faithful in how to build (or extend existing) components and controls. Demo shows an app that grabs photos... and through transitions shows them - all without a postback. Not really that impressive. Basic CSS stuff happening here. The key is the fact that all images are grabbed over XmlHttpRequest via the Atlas Framework.
Another brief mention of JSON. This was also mentioned in the KeyNote, but I'm still confused as to "what" JSON is... Is it the client framework that gives JS the WebRequest, WebResponse, etc.?
Atlas Control classes (TextBox, ListView) derive from Web.UI.Control. Controls can manipulate the DOM to handle events and participate in validation (Atlas client-side validation).
Goal of Atlas Server controls: enhance server controls to generate "Atlas"-enabled pages while preserving server programming model. They are built on ASP.NET 2.0 (IScriptComponent, ScriptManager, RenderScript, and server-side representations of bindings, actions, behaviors). Atlas controls maintain support for postback scenarios.
Nikhil blitzkreig'd through the upcoming Atlas features (the slide was up maybe less than 3 seconds)... so no idea where they are going. They could already have my note below on-tap. I may attend the ask the experts tonight to find out.
His last demo talks about the DOM inspector, script debugger and http-logger that he will make available on his blog. He intends to incorporate this and richer script authoring components into Atlas in the future.
Summary: [NOTE TO SCOBLE, listen up buddy - and tell the right folks.] After going through both part 1 and 2 of the introduction to Atlas, I have to say that <atlas:controls&rt; are WAY too verbose today with their crazy xml angle-bracket bindings (bindings->binding; or even worse in the js: button->click->invokeMethod). It should be a property of the control, binding="datasource.field". Or like with behaviors it should be behavior="behaviorType" vs. angle-bracketed multiple sub-nested behaviors->add->behavior. Let's hope that this will be improved before it's official release as an add-on to VS2005/.NET 2.0 next year.
Tags: [PDC05]
posted @ Thursday, September 15, 2005 12:42 PM