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Scriptlets: Killer Components For The Web

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PCQ Bureau
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Anyone using a Web-based

application today is familiar with the routine: enter

some data, click a button, and wait for a new page.

Sometimes, especially if you made a mistake or forgot

something important, the new page looks a lot like the

old page. You wonder sometimes when the Web is ever going

to grow up and start behaving like the smoothly running

productivity apps you use on your desktop every day.

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With Dynamic HTML and

Scripting Library, that day is substantially closer, if

not already here.

The

user experience

When we use an application

we interact with it as a kind of conversation. We do a

few things and then we expect some feedback. Then we do a

few more things and expect more feedback. Very few

interesting applications can be resolved in just one

shot. As we interact with an application, we expect the

feedback we get to be in context, using what we’ve

already seen and done as a way to focus our attention and

help us find the right thing to do next.

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But we

all know the Web is built on a stateless protocol called

HTTP. This means that those of us creating Web apps must

constantly wrestle with the problem of giving the user

the best possible experience with little help from

underlying machinery of the Web. We’ve become quite

adept at using concepts like ‘cookies’ to

create illusion of a continuous session between client

browser and Web server.

Still, we live with many

constraints. Every time a Web application interacts with

the server, browser must navigate to a new page. As

application designers, we have to live with the flash

associated with refreshing the current page, perhaps

changing it only a little bit. Perhaps, you’ve used

the trick of pretending that by loading a completely

different page that contains what we want to tell the

user. Either way, we’ve all felt the constraints

imposed by the Web.

The

new Web computing model

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While the Web has been

evolving gradually, richer programming facilities are

finally reaching a new plateau. It is now possible to

create Web applications using Dynamic HTML, that are as

rich as what could be created with more established

client/server programming environments, such as Microsoft

Visual Basic.

What

is a Scriptlet?




Simple concept with global reach

A scriptlet is a

component for the Web. They are a standard feature of IE

4.0. Scriptlets combine the benefits of component

programming with Dynamic HTML and script. The

consequences of this combination, however, transcend the

Web.

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Component-based

software

Components are now

recognized as a key technology to improve the amount and

quality of software. These are units of software that are

self-contained and designed to be used through simple

interfaces. While most early components were designed to

present some visual appearance to the end-user,

components can consist of pure logic and may have no

visual representation for the end-user whatsoever.

A programmer developing an

application uses substantial design-time

information about a component to understand how to

customize it and use it in his program. Much of this

information is not needed to actually run the resulting

application at run time. Component architectures

today therefore, try to identify the information only

needed at design time and organize the packaging of

components so that this information does not need to be

carried in the finished application.

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Most component

architectures today describe the component interfaces in

terms of three concepts: properties, methods, and events.

Properties act like named

memory values inside the component. They are the means

for customizing the component at design time. Properties

can also be used to inspect the state of a component or

modify its behavior at run time.

Methods are operations

that a component can perform at run time to carry out

useful work. Together with properties, methods are means

for a program to communicate information into a

component.

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Events are notices that a

component transmits at run time to the outside

application. These events are the primary means for

communicating information out of a component.

Benefits

of components

Components isolate

themselves from their surrounding program, except through

the well-defined interfaces they expose. In this way,

errors elsewhere in a program will not affect a

component. Historically, the ability of an error to have

unexpected consequences throughout a program has made

debugging difficult and expensive. By removing this

source of errors, components simplify programming and

reduce costs and risks.

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Another substantial

benefit of well-designed components is reuse. A component

can be used in many programs without having to be

modified. Intelligent use of properties to allow

customization can avoid the trap of copying source code

and making changes. As anyone who has dealt with the long

term consequence of copying and modifying source code

knows, maintenance costs and integration bugs become

overwhelming.

Lastly, components can be

combined that have been written in different programming

languages (provided the underlying component architecture

supports this). COM does exactly this, facilitating a

market for reusable components that allow much richer

applications to be constructed in much less time than

ever before. One no longer must spend time converting

code from one language to another just to get the

functionality trapped in that code.

Components

on the Web

With the introduction of

scripting languages to the Web, the Internet has been

transformed to a dynamic environment supporting

sophisticated programming. Particularly with the

introduction of Dynamic HTML, the Web is maturing into

the user interface framework of choice for Web

programmers.

The

scriptlet architecture

Scriptlets themselves are

simply Web pages in which script has been written

according to certain conventions. They are used by

inserting an OBJECT tag into another Web page. The

scriptlet is named by any standard URL. IE 4.0 recognizes

a scriptlet by marking the tag as using a MIME type of

"text/x-scriptlet". Note that there is no CLSID

in the OBJECT tag. For example:

width=200 height=123



TYPE="text/x-scriptlet"
DATA="Calendar.htm">




IE 4.0 supports this MIME

type on all platforms–Windows, Mac, or Unix. Because

of the open nature of the architecture, third party

vendors will be able to implement this support as well.

The functionality of a

scriptlet can be written in any scripting language,

including but not limited to JavaScript and VBScript.

On other platforms, the

implementation will have to be somewhat changed, but on

the Win32 platform, the Scriptlet MIME type exploits new

IE 4 features so that Scriptlets use a COM object to

accomplish their work.

This COM object

encapsulates Trident, the IE HTML rendering engine, and

hides most of its functionality. In this way it is

different from the Web Control object that exposes

Trident to its users. Instead, the scriptlet component

exposes the interface of the Web page that is loaded.

This exposure is

accomplished by loading the page into Trident and letting

Trident run the page’s script normally. Once

completely loaded, the scriptlet component is ready to

interact with its container. The container in the pure

Web case is of course Internet Explorer, but any COM

container, including a Visual Basic program or even

Microsoft Word, can insert a scriptlet control just like

any other ActiveX control.

The Scriptlet Component

bridge layer then acts as a broker, passing requests for

properties and methods into the scriptlet and passing

events out of it. The bridge also performs certain basic

housekeeping functions such as negotiating the size of

the scriptlet between the container and Trident.

Security

considerations

Scriptlets are as secure

as Dynamic HTML and script itself. A scriptlet

furthermore recognizes when it is placed in a secure

container, such as Internet Explorer, and obeys the

security policies of its container.

In general, to operate

correctly, a scriptlet must be loaded from the same Web

server as its container page. These are the same

restrictions in force for Java applets, for example.

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