If you are building a Rich UI application with Rational Business Developer, you'll notice there are a variety of widgets that appear on the palette for you to drag and drop unto your Design tab. However, there are a number of widgets, handlers, libraries, and more in the RUI and Dojo projects that don't appear on the palette. We don't want you to miss out on these useful tools though! So here's a little more information to get you more familiar with what's available.
In the Rich UI project,
com.ibm.egl.rui, you'll find InfoBus, History, Loader, and MVC in addition to the widgets.
InfoBus is a publish-and-subscribe mechanism that allows handlers to receive data when an event occurs. This type of mechanism is particularly useful for communication between handlers, such as knowing when data has changed, and keeping all the handlers up-to-date with the changes.
History provides a mechanism to use the browser's Back and Forward buttons to show different 'pages'. Since web 2.0 applications differ from JSF apps by allowing you to update parts of the screen, you can control what on-screen content you identify as a separate page.
Loader provides a way to dynamically load the pages of your application, reducing the load time and improving application performance. You can read more in the blog on
Starting your large Rich UI application faster with Dynamic Loading. MVC stands for Model (data and logic to access), View (the user interface or UI) and Controller (the interaction between the UI and model).
MVC is a common architectural pattern that allows you to isolate domain logic from the UI, allowing you to develop and maintain this separation for flexibility. For examples of using InfoBus and History, see the Rich UI technical sample project,
com.ibm.rui.samples, linked from Samples page of the product Welcome screen. The tutorial "Create a mortgage application using EGL Rich UI" located in the product Help also uses InfoBus.
In the Dojo project,
com.ibm.egl,dojo.widgets, you see a items such as ContextMenu, Dialog, TitlePane, and Tooltip.
ContextMenu generally is invoked by a right-click, and like DojoMenu is made up of DojoMenuItems.
Dialog provides a pop-up dialog that appears on top of the right of your UI and can contain a number of widgets.
TitlePane provides a collapsible container with a title bar and lets you control where it appears open or collapsed and the time duration to animate the open and collapse.
Tooltip is generally used for contextual help text and allows you to control the position and delay before it appears. The product help provides more information on each
Dojo widgets as well as a very useful sample project,
com.ibm.egl.dojo.samples, that shows each of the Dojo widgets in action which is also available from the Samples page of the Welcome. To show how the RUI and Dojo projects can work together, the ContextMenuSample handler uses InfoBus to track and display which menu items have been clicked.
We hope this blog has made you more aware of the capabilities beyond what appears on the palette. We hope you will explore the projects and samples mentioned, and even more importantly -- make use of these in your own applications.
Theresa