XWidgetSoft Forum

Ready to kick-off.... I was thinking what more we could do.

When I took the jump into XWidget platform, I was confused with all its jargon, API etc.. I took a quite while for me to familiarize myself with this awesome program right from the ground-up. I searched and searched while I found this little community and an extensive Chinese board. While designing my widgets, I went through the examples scanty and scattered all over, amassed a lot of them and tried to understand the cryptic function names. Yes, not to forget the alien hieroglyphics that used to render gibberish in my system (for XWidget comes with UNICODE disabled, for whatever reason... may be the evil Delphi... that's just another story), unless I discovered the right code-page (by luck) and then the language (Simplified Chinese). Took a round at the Google Translate and managed to get some of the Auto-complete text translated to English. That resulted in poor quality text however.

I took me months to familiarize with the UI itself, then again much time struggling with the JScript API. JScript wasn't so hard (I'm a web developer, experienced in HTML, CSS, JS, Java,Silverlight etc..) to conquer, but for someone who has worked with an MSDN window stacked to the side (believe me, I bet, you won't find anyone remembering the heck lot of browser JS events, or the full JQuery library ) with specs clearly printed on a sheet of paper, without a line of proper documentation was like a wild trek in Atacama desert.

And in an effort to improve the quality of the Auto-complete and create a reference for all those whose design all awesome widgets and also for the convenience of the beloved users who run and install our widgets on their machines.

GOALS
1. Create complete usable help documentation for XWidget in English such as basic a how-to on program functions. *
2. Create complete usable documentation of XWidget Scripting API, functions and core tags. *
3. Add extensive tutorials, screenshots. *
4. Include basic guide/tutorial towards scripting in JS(? VBScript, may not be, unless someone with knowledge joins me)
4. Localization, translation of help documents and helper tools. (I think I'll ever go anything beyond English and Bangla by myself)

Priority from descending from top. Items not marked * are low-priority goals.

This is a pure volunteering effort. I invite all contributors here to help with building an extensive help documentation.
Expecting positive feedback

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This is very great, this is what I've been looking for .
Do we need some online SDK/DOC web system support?

I had try the wiki system and CMS system,but failed

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XWidget Software Developer
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I thought of putting it into a PDF and uploading it here... Then you could include that into release distributions.
Going Online is a really great idea... Having robust docs online boosts popularity of products. IMHO, most don't bother searching through help docs, the just google their way.

A wiki would be ideal, but seeing the demand it puts on resources... It would be better if you add few simple pages to the existing CMS

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Can anyone write an Introduction. I'm currently doing the basic how-to and reference,

Yes, a lot new functions have been added and I don't have the list of them. (I translate the last somewhere at v1.8). It would be very nice If there were a list of the functions

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google+

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Life is a myriad game... Just play it!

Help needed guys... I'm too busy these days.

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Life is a myriad game... Just play it!

Is there a central location for the documentation created so far?

http://doc.xwidget.com


*A few pieces are public, rest are heavily under-construction. Some are lying for lack of screenshots, and developer sections are just entirely blank. Sorry, I was busy, then bed-ridden for past few days.

We would appreciate if you would help us in any way as you can. Especially in screenshots, and cross-OS behavior. The android section is also urgently in need of text

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I will try to help. I am just becoming re-acquainted with the Xwidget engine and I will need help more than I can donate to it. However I will try.

Is it a Wiki? how do we make changes?

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Life is a myriad game... Just play it!

Digigamer, I Like what you've done but I don't think it is correct tool for the project.

I really wanted to help on this but I think the great deterrent is that widget designers aren't able to go in and contribute as and when they'd like. The Joomla CMS solution you have proposed is attractive but it does not allow casual modification and update as a Wiki does. A CMS requires a log-in, maintenance and one or two people to be documentation co-ordinators.

Personally, I'd like to be able to add to the documentation periodically but I don't want to be a main documentation co-ordinator. None of us have the time.

I suggest we create something very similar to your design but in the form of a wiki, then we can all contribute and dive in and out when we require. It will be very easy to add and modify content and we can do it all on a supported platform that needs little maintenance. This way the documentation (which is Xwidget's greatest weakness) can grow and become a useful tool.

I don't see the documentation improving much after the two years or so that Xwidget has existed. We need a more well-used approach that other projects take. Lets follow in their footsteps.

Any suggestions? Wikia?

The reason I am continuing the discussion here is that it is one that the community needs to be involved in.

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XWidget Software Developer
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I think it is a very good idea, if you create the wiki Tony then it will make it 'official'. We can then all contribute.

Well, I say, those interested to contribute can always ask anyone on the admin for access.
I think a CMS, allows for greater content control and structure. Also, it can function is various ways.

Initially Tony and I discussed over the idea of an wiki, but my experience says, you allow open control, people vandalize. Maintaining wikis have always been a headache. Though I don't think we are ever going to amass so much content to create troubles, but if such thing happens, wikis might be a curse.
However, i'm personally fine with either, though strongly favoring CMS.

And for wannabe contributors, we can put up a sticky tutorial. I remember it took me 15 mins to get used to a CMS (it was WordPress), without much knowledge of servers and beyond. It is damn simple.

My poor health prevents me to be active these days, and will continue for quite some months. I took a look at the docs, it appeared dead.

If any one needs tutorials POST here quickly. I can use devices today, may not be tomorrow

If we decide to migrate to a wiki, please inform me before hand, i'll take my super-meds and migrate them nicely

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Life is a myriad game... Just play it!

I think what you set up digigamer, is great - I just don't think that potential contributors will be happy to contribute to a CMS that does not allow casual addition of content. Joomla is great but casual updates is not its strength.

The wiki will be hard to maintain, perhaps, but if we have a few monitors who receive notifications of any updates between us we can keep it on track. A good wiki with captchas &c should stop the bots. As long as we have regular notifications, a good review team, backups and can back-out updates as we require, it should work.

Sorry to hear you aren't well, this time last year was hit by double-pneumonia that took seven months to fully clear. I know what it is like to be debilitated.

Tony, please create the wiki and then we will start to populate it.

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XWidget Software Developer
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We need two extensions, one to allow links to embedded videos and another to convert straight windows text (with new lines) to text with line breaks <br />.

At the moment copying anything from the forum to the wiki is painful as you have to manually add the line breaks at the end of every line. We can't do this for all text as we will be forever inserting line breaks and not doing any work.

Tony, can you install these? It will make the whole process a lot easier.
Also we may need different pages to those provided, can you give me access to make changes, corrections to typos to page titles?

If you could make me an admin I could do some of this stuff myself.

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XWidget Software Developer
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Thanks for that,

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:EmbedVideo

I haven't found a good tool for converting newlines to <br> but when I do I will let you know. I have an online tool here for now that will do:

http://www.webutils.pl/nl2br

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XWidget Software Developer
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Very good! I'll start hacking the limited documentation we have in place. If it seems in the wrong place it does not matter as we can all start to fix the documentation as we go.

Hey tony, can you give me some more permissions. Sysop to be exact
I've got edit. I need page movers, delete, undelete.
And yes, we'll need some few more extensions.

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Life is a myriad game... Just play it!

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XWidget Software Developer
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Thank you.
It works. I'll put whatever I've got at joomla to here.

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Life is a myriad game... Just play it!

Hi Tony and digigamer,

I am interested to widget systems, and their underlying technologies use.
What the graphics library and display protocol use by XWidget, is that same code base for Android and Windows.

I know XWidget not using QT, I really interested what graphic library of choice that allow cross platform/device development. Wanted to know the choice of technology to work with, another potential maybe is Skia from Google.
Furthermore, any specification for XUL file for XWidget, is it based on other discontinued widget like yahoo or opera widget?

Thanks first for sharing technology insight and knowledge, we should crowdsource the tools still useful and let them shine more than other random library.

There are similarities between the .XUL and the Yahoo widget .KON, they are both using similar XML. You'll find some lines translate directly from YWE to Xwidget without change. I'd direct you to this document: - which describes a lot of the differences between the two engines and the resulting changes in the XUL.

There are a lot of similarities between xwidget and YWE. In general Xwidget is less mature and has less functionality across the board. Xwidget does have the advantage of a GUI for composing widgets. It has the concept of 'cores' which are simply graphical representations of APIs. Xwidget uses jscript and runs solely on Windows. The drastically cut-down Android engine can support an Android version of your widget with significantly less functionality. Xwidget on Windows is buggy but it works! The dev appears to be fixing them if slowly.

Xwidgets puts javascript apps on your desktop quite successfully.

I am afraid you might wait a while to get Tony to respond to your requests, he isn't known for spending much time on the forum though he does appear from time to time. Responses to queries? Lower your expectations...

I imagine GDI, Cairo is used by Xwidget but the other components, unknown.

Back to the documentation.

The documentation needs to become/be maintained as a wiki. Otherwise it just will not grow. The greatest advance toward complete documentation would be for Tony to implement the same methods as the Yahoo widget engine, API calls &c should ALL follow YWE standards. If this was implemented then all the YWE documentation would simply slot in place. That has been written in full and comprehensively.