Re: Web like interface for standalone Win32 app?



embedded browser rather than on a form. But I would like to see this take
a step further by allowing users to actually edit the interface during
runtime and change its layout using some kind of live UI designer or HTML
editor.
I think this is easily achieved by adding a simple line of code, that
loads your form from external file if that file exist OnCreate.
Now the only thing you would need is a simple form editor, to edit that
file - I've seem them around free of charge. I think editing delphi
form stored in dfm (or text dfm, or xml if you like) file, would be
much easier for any user then to edit HTML file, especially when it
comes to table - their behavior is not something every user can put
up with. Fancy html layouting is not necessary for the majority of
cases. If you need to hide or rearrange buttons and edit captions,
you can use delphi like form editor, which seem much easier and
intuitive, then editing html. The only thing you really need in
order to create web-like looking interfaces, are a set of web-like
looking controls and I think that you can manage that with DevEx
perfectly, whereas using real html would require you to only
implement ActiveX solutions which is not very convenient for
delphi developers. So maybe the only thing one really need is a
layout control, which would work similar to html table - everything
else is found in delphi. And one more thing - a scripting suite
so you can attach event handlers. This all seem to be perfectly doable
and I even remember a great implementation, that use to be
called InstantReport. Here it is:
http://www.dream-com.com/instant.html


Michael
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