1 – Carousel, User Guide CAROUSEL User Guide Version 3.0 © Xoetrope Ltd. 2005, All rights reserved. Copyright © 2003-2005 Xoetrope Ltd. Java is a trademark of Sun Microsystems. Xoetrope reserves the right to modify Carousel in the future and while every effort has been made to ensure this document correctly depicts the software no warranty is made as to the accuracy of this document. • • • 2 • • • Carousel, User Guide 1 – Table of Contents Table of Contents CAROUSEL 2 Table of Contents 3 SECTION I 17 1 About this book........................................................................................ 19 User Guide Conventions........................................................................ 19 XUI and Carousel................................................................................... 20 Contacting Xoetrope developer support ................................................. 20 2 Introduction ............................................................................................. 21 What is Carousel? .................................................................................. 21 What can be built with Carousel?........................................................... 22 What does Carousel do? ........................................................................ 23 How does Carousel work? ..................................................................... 24 Licensing ............................................................................................... 26 3 Why Carousel? ......................................................................................... 27 Background............................................................................................ 27 Why do we build applications at all? ..................................................... 28 The Form Metaphor ............................................................................... 28 Beyond Forms........................................................................................ 29 HTML’s limits ........................................................................................ 29 Scripting ................................................................................................ 30 Application delivery in a connected world............................................. 30 Rich Client to the Rescue ....................................................................... 31 So Why Carousel?.................................................................................. 31 The Development challenge .................................................................. 31 4 Related technologies ................................................................................ 33 Carousel versus HTML ........................................................................... 33 Carousel versus AJAX............................................................................. 33 Carousel versus Java............................................................................... 34 Carousel versus Servlet and Server Side Technologies............................ 34 Carousel versus .NET ....................................................................... 35 Carousel versus XUL , XForms, XAML et al ...................................... 35 Carousel versus Ajax ........................................................................ 36 Other issues ........................................................................................... 36 Legacy application support............................................................... 36 Simple single language support ........................................................ 37 Separation of roles ........................................................................... 37 Occasionally connected................................................................... 37 Branding .......................................................................................... 37 Performance and server load............................................................ 37 • • • • 3 • • 1 – Table of Contents Carousel, User Guide SECTION II 39 5 Installing Carousel ................................................................................... 41 Downloading Carousel.......................................................................... 41 Carousel components ............................................................................ 41 XUI components.................................................................................... 42 Installing NetBeans................................................................................ 43 Loading Carousel................................................................................... 44 Installing the samples ............................................................................ 46 Installing the Eclipse plug-in .................................................................. 47 6 A quick tour of the editor ........................................................................ 49 Creating a new project........................................................................... 49 The project view.................................................................................... 55 Pages and resources............................................................................... 55 The page designer ................................................................................. 57 Components.......................................................................................... 58 Styles..................................................................................................... 60 Source code........................................................................................... 60 XML ...................................................................................................... 62 Compilation .......................................................................................... 62 Testing................................................................................................... 62 Deployment .......................................................................................... 62 7 Running applications ............................................................................... 63 Command-line startup sequence for applications................................... 63 Java Web Start Start-up Sequence .......................................................... 64 HTML/Applet Start-up Sequence............................................................ 64 Generic Initialization............................................................................. 65 Startup file stubs .................................................................................... 66 Eclipse Debugging................................................................................. 66 8 Getting started......................................................................................... 67 Hello world ........................................................................................... 67 Hello world redux ................................................................................. 68 Beyond HelloWorld .............................................................................. 69 Building a simple address form.............................................................. 70 Applying style........................................................................................ 71 Validating user inputs ............................................................................ 73 Using data ............................................................................................. 74 Responding to events............................................................................. 76 Changing pages ..................................................................................... 77 9 Projects.................................................................................................... 81 A project’s role ...................................................................................... 81 Creating a new project........................................................................... 82 Project setup.......................................................................................... 83 General setup .................................................................................. 84 Frames setup.................................................................................... 85 Files Setup ....................................................................................... 86 Extensions setup .............................................................................. 87 Extra setup....................................................................................... 87 Services provided .................................................................................. 88 • • • 4 • • • Carousel, User Guide 1 – Table of Contents 10 Designing pages ..................................................................................... 89 The role of pages ................................................................................... 89 Creating a new page .............................................................................. 89 Opening the page .................................................................................. 89 Opening the page in a frameset........................................................ 90 Preferred page size..........................................................................