Dynamic Web Development with Seaside

12Embedding Components

Building reusable components and frameworks is the goal of all developers in almost all parts of their applications. The dearth of truly reusable (canned) component libraries for most of the existing web development frameworks is a good indication that this is difficult to do.

Seaside is among the few frameworks poised to change this. It has a solid component model giving one all of the mechanisms necessary to develop well encapsulated components and application development frameworks. We have seen in Section 11.1 that components can be sequenced. In this chapter we show how to embed one component inside another component. In Section 12.6, we will see how to decorate a component to add functionality or change its appearance and as such reuse behavior. With a good component model, the possibility to display components and create new ones by reusing existing ones, writing Seaside applications is very similar to writing GUI applications.

We will start by writing an application which embeds one component, then refactor it into an application built out of two components. Finally we will discuss reuse and show how component decoration support this. We will show how components can be plugged together using events to maximize reuse.

Copyright © 19 March 2024 Stéphane Ducasse, Lukas Renggli, C. David Shaffer, Rick Zaccone
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