Visual WebGui is built on top of standard web technologies:
- Server side runtime ASP.NET
- HTTP/XML based optimized protocol
- Plain device specific optimized client code:
- Browsers: Internet Explorer, WebKit, Mozilla & Opera optimized JS, XSLT, CSS Kernels
- Silverlight: Client .NET/XAML code (in the future plain Flex swf code, mobile devices specific code)
- Smart Client: Windows Forms .NET code (in the future WPF)
Those layers are transparent to the developer in any case of UI development except for when customization is required.
Visual WebGui presents a unified visual designer for point & click editing of UI look & feel without getting down to: CSS, HTML, XAML etc.
Furthermore, an integrated tool to wrap in any 3rd party ASP.NET based control within a Visual WebGui application exists within the Professional Studio version of Visual WebGui.
Themes & Control Level Designer Overview
Visual WebGui provides a visual designer for point & click to the following DHTML controls layers:
With Silverlight, the customization levels are identical, though the technologies are different:
Paradigm result: due to the fact that over 90% of the customization cases are based on the top 3 levels and those three levels’ customization is identical to any deployed presentation-layer (shown here DHTML & Silverlight and will be the same with any other presentation layer only with different underlying technologies), Visual WebGui maintains the approach of having a single code base here as well.
The hierarchical structure of the controls theme makes it most simple to define global definitions at any desired level (global Control, Control’s Parent and Control specific).
The internal process of applying the theme’s definitions and resources is done at compile time so that the runtime efficiency is not affected from the number of available themes or from resources collecting process.
Design developer user interface
Theme view & resources types’ selector:
Images point & click editor:
Styles point & click editing:
Integrated 3rd Party Controls Wrapper Overview
Another extensibility option, except from the above customization option is the automatic 3rd party ASP.NET controls wrapper. This integrated capability enables migrating in any native ASP.NET based control (i.e. Infragistics, Telerik, DeveXpress, ComponentOne etc.) and interface with Visual WebGui as if it’s a native control.
Having those kind of controls wrapped in, provides an automatic mechanism of integration the ASP.NET native request/response mechanisms with Visual WebGui ones. This unique offering works on the pipeline level, imitating the ASP.NET control’s environment.
Working with an ASP.NET wrapped control exposes the same API and requires the same operation techniques. This means that any resource that is expected to be provided to this control should be provided here as well.
Wrapper runtime process:
Automatic wrapping process UI:
Summary
Visual WebGui’s extensibility & customization options are served as productive driven tools to the developer. The mechanisms required to apply design changes and runtime abilities are wrapped into an optimized engine.
Except for the WYSIWYG forms designer, Visual WebGui provides a visually simple solution to edit, re-create and customize Visual WebGui controls. In addition an automatic tool for migration of 3rd party controls is also enabled immediately widening the available verity of controls with all the kinds of ASP.NET based controls by any of the existing providers.
The developer has the complete power to customize & brand the application using a point & click designer to change the look & feel completely according to the customers’ requirements.
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