Entering Plupload (aka the death of FileUploadForm)

In Wigbi 0.99, I had a really handy UI plugin called FileUploadForm, which could upload any number of files with AJAX. All you needed to do was to add such a form to the page to have it handle the entire file upload process automatically.

However,as I yesterday sat down to migrate the old plugin so that it would work together with the new Wigbi version, I thought “hey, three years have passed – there MUST be an even easier way to upload files”.

Believe it or not…there was.

The people behind Tiny MCE have created a really nice file upload component called Plupload. It supports several ”runtimes” – from jQuery-based file upload in HTML4/5 to Flash, Silverlight, Gears etc. and is insanely easy to configure. You can tell Plupload which runtimes you’d prefer to use, which file types to support etc. The users can then upload files either with a regular “select file(s)” dialog or by dragging files from an Explorer/Finder window.

To make Plupload work flawlessly with Wigbi, I moved the upload.php file to the ~/wigbi/pages/ folder and added some extra functionality, like starting/stopping Wigbi and being able to adjust the target folder with a query string variable. All in all, adding Plupload to my Wigbi-based site took 10 minutes and worked perfect.

Due to this, I will not create a new version of the old FileUploadForm plugin. I will rather add an upload.php dummy page to the ~/wigbi/pages/ folder, that describes how to adjust the upload file that is included with Plupload.

UI plugin development started

I have finished a couple of more data plugins and will now modify the way Wigbi handles AJAX methods. A new alpha release will be up in a couple of days.

I will also connect my development environment to the Google Code SVN, so that all checkins will be instantly available. Hopefully, this will simplify the release handling as well.

Regardin UI plugins, I will start to convert all existing UI plugins to Wigbi 1.0. However, since Wigbi 1.0 will come bundles with jQuery UI (which can be removed if it is not needed), a couple of Wigbi 0.92 UI plugins will not be converted and therefore not available in Wigbi 1.0.

A couple of such plugins are PopupWindow and AutoCompleteExtender, for which there exists greeaaaaat jQuery UI alternatives.Wigbi will instead provide more functional UI plugins, like login/logout forms, file upload forms etc.

New class inheritance and JSON functionality in Wigbi.JS 1.0

Previous versions of Wigbi have used both MooTools and jQuery as embedded toolkits. Now, however, I have decided to exclude MooTools and only keep jQuery.

MooTools have some really nice features, but since i only used its object inheritance and JSON implementation, I decided to exclude it in the upcoming 1.0 release. The less 3rd part components, the better.

New class inheritance model

When I no longer have the MooTools Object class, I use the jQuery extend function to create inheriting classes, as such:

function InheritingClass()
{
   $.extend(this, new BaseClass("optional parameters"));
};

while the MooTools Object class required a syntax like this:

var InheritingClass = Class(
{
   Extends: BaseClass,
   initialize: function() { this.parent("optional parameters"); }
});

The later example requires knowledge about the MooTools object model, while the first only requires that developers know how to use the extend method. In my opinion, it is also easier to implement a function rather than an associative array.

JSON encoding/decoding

MooTools features a nice JSON encode/decode implementation, which I thus will not be able to use anymore. Therefore, I had to find an alternative way of working with JSON.

jQuery contains (at least) two functions that can be used to handle JSON – parseJSON and serializeArray. However, the later only works with DOM elements, so it is not really what I was after.

After doing some reading, it seems like the official json.org JSON JavaScript implementation is the best around, while a jQuery plugin that I found had quite an extensive issue list.

So, although it makes me depend on yet another 3rd part component, I chose this nice little class, which I have used before. MooTools is hereby completely replaced with jQuery (and the small JSON class).

Demos being written

I have now written new demos for the new ThemeHandler class as well as for a few controls. I will finish all demos before releasing the new Wigbi release – 0.99.1.

The InputValidator has been completely rewritten, save for key press handling and validation. It is now added to the Wigbi control collection, which makes interaction with it a lot easier.

After the 0.99.1 release, I will go through the JavaScript code for all controls and JQuerify it, to make it even neater