Glow Framework

[arthurakay]

A coworker of mine just saw this:
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/glow/

Apparently the BBC developed their own Ajax framework. Looks interesting... was wondering if anyone has ever played with it?

[jgarcia@tdg-i.com]

wow BBC Browser Support Standards compliance ??

[Animal]

They are very concerned with standards and accessibility.

Their homepage is very impressive, and their iPlayer (online TV) page looks like Flash, but is all pure DOM + Javascript + CSS. The actual player itself is Flash. I'm currently watching "South Pacific" in hi def!

It's a very impressive piece of work.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/

[mankz]

Looks ok sure, but creating a library to deal just with legacy browsers that will be gone soon, really...? I doubt this will be worth the investment of making widgets work in Safari 1.3 and IE 5.5. I expect the non-BBC-developer adoption of this library to remain around 0%...

[jgarcia@tdg-i.com]

no any-def for me!
Currently BBC iPlayer TV programmes are available to play in the UK only

[enpasos]

Besides technique - the license is attractive for the open source community: Apache License 2

[jheid]

It's interesting as it supports old browsers.
But I don't understand why they used their own API again. Why not be compatible with e.g. jQuery where "jQuery('selector')" would mean the same as "glow('selector')"...

[Animal]

I've just downloaded it for a peek at their code. It's easy to read and commented. Looks good.

Their selector API (and in fact their DOM API) encapsulates Nodes rather than Elements

This is different to jQuery and others. You can include text nodes which is cool.

I like their concept that DOM nodes are encapsulated by a NodeList. Similar to Ext's CompositeElement, except that there is no Element. You can of course have a NodeList with only one member. That simplifies things, no dichotomy between Element and CompositeElement.

There is a lot of good stuff in there and good techniques. Good for getting some ideas!

[Lobos]

The design is sexy - this is one thing that I find a little irritating with Ext, the design feels out of date. I know we can change it, but still I feel that someone (ie client without programming experience) looking at glow and looking at Ext would take glow because it looks better.

[jgarcia@tdg-i.com]

The design is sexy - this is one thing that I find a little irritating with Ext, the design feels out of date. I know we can change it, but still I feel that someone (ie client without programming experience) looking at glow and looking at Ext would take glow because it looks better.

Where did you find online demos that show the layout of how things work?
Let me know if they have a full component/event/container and layout models to work with. from what i see, they are loosely coupled widgets.

[Animal]

Oh yes, it's mainly a foundation library like jQuery. It has DOM, animation and events at its core. But it has a few widgets too, but no integrated RIA structure. It's their foundation code which is most interesting.

[DigitalSkyline]

Looks like it has a lot that Ext core doesn't have ... like panels, drag and drop, masking. Very interesting indeed.