Extjs for application (with built-in HTTP server)
Is there a framework that makes it easy to add ExtJS to a regular .Net application. This way I only need to create the GUI once, which is then accessible through the embedded web server. This is great since then I can remotely access the server / service / application and also fiddle with it locally.
My dream would be: - The framework will somehow convert the existing GUI (winforms) to ExtJS when a local http connection is made. This way I can just use the standard GUI tools to develop the application and trust that the framework will do its transformation magic when the http request is made.
A less preferred but also cool solution would be: - The framework provides classes like ExtJS that I create and define properties (like canvas, buttons, etc.) and callbacks (events). These classes are then used to create the extjs GUI when creating the connection.
The least preferred solution would be: - To manually do javascript encoding and handle incoming asynchronous async calls and thus render all interface content.
Does something like this already exist? Or is this what I will be doing for the next X months; ^)
thanks!
R
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I would recommend using the http://liveui.net framework. It provides ASP.net based controls that automatically convert to Extjs controls. I also contain useful tools for rapid application development and ... it's free.
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You can review your requirements here. The WinForms model is very different from ExtJS or traditional HTML forms, so converting your application to a web application on the fly will be difficult at best. It's been a while since I looked at ExtJS myself, but does it have equivalents to all the standard WebForms controls? What about user controls and other controls provided by third parties? And owner control?
Instead of spending months on something that might not work as expected, I would suggest that you take a look at breaking your application correctly. If you decouple your data layer and expose it as a specific type of web service, you can easily make it available to both your win forms application and your ExtJS web application. As long as you keep your business logic as well as your data layer inside the web services, the user interface itself should be fairly simple. Probably easy enough that automatic web gui generation is not worth the time.
Anyway. If you really really want to go that route, you might consider using a web service to describe your GUI and build both your WinForms gui and ExtJS gui on the fly. Both technologies support the creation of forms in code, so you can upload a file describing the gui and create it the first time the user starts the application. This would require you to write two sets of gui build code, but since it would be based on a format you control it will probably be easier than converting a WinForms application to ExtJS directly.
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