I'm planning to use list & label as a reporting tool for my MVC Web Application, I downloaded the trial version and the sample code was really helpful.
I'm almost settled on using this as my app's reporting tool but I'm thinking twice on their web app report designer tool, because I needed to install the chrome extension before I can use it.
I'm using version LL v.20
So my questions are:
Is the chrome extension really needed for the designer to work? I'm thinking that if my app goes live, will I require my clients to install this plugin first?
Will the designer have issues on other browser? So far I haven't seen extensions/plugins for IE (only Fireforx, Safari, Opera, Chrome).
PS. If all else fail, can you suggest an alternative for this? The reporting tool that I need is web-based and allows end-users to edit the reports. Thanks!
1) Yes, you need to install the plugin on the client side.
2) For IE, there's a Designer ActiveX. Simply open your existing app in IE, you should be offered to install the OCX right away.
As to your general concerns:
We plan to replace the plugins with a client-side application that can be one-time installed with a couple of clicks in LL21. The reasoning is the step-by-step deprecation of plugins by most browser vendors. Changing between the plugins and the new designer app will be quite easy. The new designer will also support previewing at design time. Depending on when you plan to ship your application it may well be worth the wait till October.
I have tried List and Label Web Designer and found that installing additional application for all users is not a good idea. Will look for another solutions, may be FastReport.Net. That online designer is realy online and can work not only on Windows.
Related
I need to create a firefox plugin that allows a user to take screenshots of any part of their desktop and have them uploaded to a server. There seems to be lots of plugins for screen capturing a webpage, but nothing for capturing anything outside of firefox. So after a little research I have not found much information on how this might be possible. I don't want to resort to a using a java applet but I will if that is my only option.
Does anyone have advice on how I might create such a feature?
Thanks
I don't think a Firefox addon is the most appropriate approach here. Maybe split the task into a Firefox addon to offer the "upload to a server" component and a native app to do the desktop screenshot (or just integrate with existing screenshot tools).
If you're worried about complicating the installation process for end users, you could look into bundling the addon component and native app into a single installer (e.g. MSI on Windows, RPM on Linux, etc.). You'll have to come up with different apps for each platform you want to support (and maybe even each version - e.g. Windows XP vs Windows 10).
Whatever you decide, you'll probably need to create a more specific question to get further help here (there's no simple Firefox.Addons.API.TakeScreenShot() answer I'm afraid).
Also make sure you're using the right terminology - a plugin is the deprecated NPAPI approach whereas addons are still supported.
I'm actually working on taking native desktop screenshots just in the last coupel of days. I'm using js-ctypes. My work goal is the same exact thing to, upload to server. If you would like to collaborate I am very open to it! We can chat about it on #jsctypes irc channel :) irc://moznet/jsctypes (Mibbit IRC WebApp) If you don't know js-ctypes thats ok i can handle that while you can handle uploading techniques, and an editor on canvas :) The editor is a huge part of it, you can see my ideas/plans here: https://github.com/Noitidart/NativeShot/wiki/NativeShot
I'm really really interested in a collab on this!
I'm still working on windows right now, the color is messed up: https://github.com/Noitidart/NativeShot/tree/digitanks-method
I was just about to start OSX work following this example here: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/samplecode/SonOfGrab/Introduction/Intro.html and here: Take ScreenShot without Window
You can install the addon from that branch and click the icon that gets added to the toolbar, it will take a screenshot with 3sec delay and then append it to the body of the selected tab. (Windows only right now)
Doneskis baby check it out: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nativeshot/
Got some quirks. Released it as v1.0 though. I'm working on Android support, pretty close. I need to flesh out the editor tools. Please let me know if you're willing to collaborate.
I am just wondering if is it possible to run extension like colorzilla / firebug in xulrunner.
In fact I am creating my own extension now and I was trying addon_sdk but this is very problematic to put extension icon/button next to location bar.
So I decided to work with xul, and I know that problem doesn't exist here. And Of course the best way to learn is analyze other code, a changing it. But I can't run any extension in xulrunner. Any hint / help ?
xulrunner is just a runtime or platform. You'd need an actual app on top of that. In that regard, Firefox, Thunderbird, Seamonkey, InstantBird, etc. can be considered (complex) xulrunner apps.
Existing extensions may run, with or without modifications in such a xulrunner app. Well, likely with modifications, as most extensions use APIs specific to Firefox or Thunderbird or ...
The add-on SDK is not generally isn't a good fit for generic xulrunner apps: It is too much tailered against Firefox specifically.
I'm looking for the tool for accessibility check (the system I'm working on should comply with WCAG2AA).
At the moment we use a code sniffer from squiz labs, which we manually run against our pages.
I would like to take it a step further and have it as a part of TFS gated checkin.
I'm aware this is not as trivial (we use ASP.NET MVC) and will require a browser engine to generate html as part of the same process. There also might be situations when a suppression would have to be added, etc.
Would be grateful if someone could point me in the right direction or maybe there is already a tool (in that case probably combination of tools), which I'm not aware of.
Accessibility checks can't be entirely made by automatic tools (it needs a human to decide if these headings make sense in a page for example), but it's still a great help for half of the tests you've to run.
I'm aware of:
Tanaguru, an open source solution that you can install (Java Tomcat thing) or run as a service. It'll check against your source code (before any DOM modification) many tests from Accessiweb reference list, an understandable (pun intended) implementation of WCAG2.0. The silver level is equivalent to AA level of conformance.
For Tanaguru service, you can provide a test login and password if your server is private and for the standalone code, being open source you can add it to your development process the way you want.
You can test Tanaguru here: http://my.tanaguru.com/?lang=en
WAVE Toolbar will run against code in your browser. This is a Firefox extension, beware that http://wave.webaim.org/ will check HTML code sent from server, not in the browser (the difference is about JS modifying the DOM)
Opquast is both a checklist about quality (accessibility and many other things unrelated, check it at least once it's worth it ;) and a paid service: Opquast reporting. You can run your pages against the Opquast checklist or Accessibility first steps and second steps (this is not WCAG 2.0, it's about the errors that are so obvious you should have repaired before going further with accessibility improvements).
Opquast reporting will export results as PDF, DOC/ODT as well as CSV so you can use it with your own automated test environment.
EDIT 2014: Opquast Desktop is a Firefox extension that'll test pages in your browser (there were a few quirks with Win8, be patient if it's still the case and they aren't on AMO because Mozilla will change their requirements overnight... but knowing personnally and having worked for the awesome team that is behind Opquast, I trust them)
Tenon.io by K. Groves is a new service I barely tested till now, but it's worth checking it
Related article: http://webaim.org/articles/freetools/ (quite old if it doesn't speak of WCAG 2.0, but formats and such are still an interesting read)
I have a Delphi VCL application which I'm using to show some pictures and I would like to know if there is any possibility to transform it into a browser plugin (like firefox, google chrome etc ) in order to load it remotely, like a java applet.
for all of them the answer is NO. even for IE it is sometimes difficult...VCL applications means win32/64 development in general, browsers are more 'related' to web development. you can reconsider and try to resolve this by using an already existing platform which can be easily integrated into web browsers like Shockwave (yeah, I don't like to give links to wikipedia...) or another similar tool.
You can use VirtualUI from CybeleSoft to run your Windows app in a browser. You still need to set up your backend server with database etc, and make sure that some operations are blocked - you don't want someone to browse through your server files ;-)
There are options:
ActiveX plugin (you might need to enable ActiveX support in browser or use a special plugin to enable it)
NPAPI plugin (will be deprecated in Chrome in late 2014). See question: How to embed Delphi VCL form into HTML page using NPAPI?
Take a look at the samples on Raudus. It might be what you are looking for. It will be interesting for you to read this about VCL compatible component set for the web.
Background info:
Over the past week, I have been messing around with Chrome extensions and had no problem creating my extension. Great, Chrome rocks for making the development process very easy to learn, and, well... just easy!
Now I have it in my mind that I'd like to create this extension for as many browsers as I can, so I decided on Firefox next.
What a mess! There documentation has done nothing but give me a headache and waste my time so far, VERY convoluted and just generally unorganized.
I have managed to locate a code sample for a simple extension that I think I can use as a starting point and have begun messing around with - fine...
I have learned that this sample extension will not work with anything less than Firefox 4, as it uses the bootstrap technique to make the extension installable without a browser restart. Ughhhhhh....
Now we arrive at my questions:
Is it possible to develop an extension for Firefox 7 that will work with previous versions of Firefox? I don't even care about anything prior to Firefox 4, if that's the cutoff point for restart-less installations. It would be nice to know that what I am spending all this time making will work consistently and for more than a week when the user is prompted to upgrade next.
How about the reverse? Can I create an extension that is compatible with Firefox 3.5 through Firefox 7? I realize it would require a restart to install, but that would be acceptable if it resulted in a working extension regardless of the version.
Can anyone with experience on this stuff share a bit of what I'm getting myself into here? It seems like this is a nightmare of a platform to develop on, and that I will be constantly fixing my extension.
One last piece of relevant information:
The extension I am developing is purely javascript based - this stuff should work (I think?) because it's dependent on just one feature "content scripts" that really shouldn't be changing in implementation between versions at this point... right?
So what exactly am I missing? How do you create easily manageable Firefox extensions that will work in all versions of the browser?
Thanks everyone! :)
You have to distinguish between "traditional" extensions and extensions built with the Add-on SDK. The former are far more powerful given that they have direct access to all APIs the browser uses - but that's also the reason why they are more complicated to write and why the documentation is rather unordered (there are simply very many things that you could do, far more than you could with Chrome). They are also more likely to break as the browser changes. The Add-on SDK on the other hand gives you a limited API much like Chrome. The Add-on SDK currently supports everything from Firefox 4 onwards (yes, because of restartless installation), with the promise that browser changes will merely require your add-on to be recompiled with a newer version of the Add-on SDK. In fact, that recompiling will likely happen automatically in future for add-ons hosted on addons.mozilla.org. On to your questions:
Is it possible to develop an extension for Firefox 7 that will work with previous versions of Firefox?
Sure it is. The Add-on SDK currently marks your add-on as compatible with anything between Firefox 4 Beta 7 and Firefox 8 Alpha 1. Even as traditional add-ons go - starting with Firefox 4 the differences between particular browser versions are rather small, most things work in all of them. You can also stay compatible with Firefox 3.x but depending on what you do it might require some effort. Important information:
Firefox 4 for developers
Firefox 5 for developers
Firefox 6 for developers
Firefox 7 for developers
How about the reverse? Can I create an extension that is compatible with Firefox 3.5 through Firefox 7?
It doesn't matter which way you go. I wouldn't recommend spending much time on Firefox 3.x support however. With Firefox 3.5 no longer supported the only relevant version is Firefox 3.6. According to the statistics of my add-ons roughly 18% of the Firefox users continue using it. In the next few months this percentage will get significantly smaller, especially when Mozilla announces end-of-life for this branch. So for a new add-on supporting it is usually not justified.
Can anyone with experience on this stuff share a bit of what I'm getting myself into here?
Depends on how complicated your add-on will be. Given that you are developing an equivalent to a Chrome extension, you will most likely be using the Add-on SDK which means that there won't be any compatibility problems. As traditional add-ons go, simple add-ons that don't rely on some obscure implementation details also typically don't have any trouble staying compatible (I have two add-ons that didn't need a single adjustment since Firefox 3.5). Add-ons that go deep down into the system are more problematic of course.