Look and Feel - The Adept GUI Layout

While Adept is an application server, it provides an interface that has more in common with a native GUI program.

The Adept system will normally open in a browser window without menu, button bar or status bar. It provides multiple windows into one or more applications running under Adept. Each of these windows run in their own panel. Panels can run in desktop mode - in which case they cover the browser window excluding a tab bar at the button - or window mode when they can be dragged or resized. The result is similar to a Windows MDI (multi-document interface) application.

A typical Adept application will have one desktop panel containing multiple window panels, providing different views, forms or data. Because a user is free to maximise a window panel to create a desktop one, this structure can be modified to suite individual tastes.

A window panel can have a resize point on the bottom left, a title tab on the top, a border and a shadow. Each feature can be turned off. In addition the title tab can be set to only become visible when the mouse curson hovers over it.

This allows the developer many visual options. By positioning panels to suit and turning off all decorations, an application interface would appear totally different to the same code where the panels could overlap, be resized or moved.

All these options can be set programatically or by the user. Once changed they are saved so that next time the program is run the same windows will display with the same decorations, at the same size and at the same location.

Each panel can have a horizontal menu and button bar associated with it. In most cases, the desktop panel will have these tools while the inner window panels provide more detailed information. There are times, however, when having an inner window panel with menu and button bar makes sense - an editor panel for instance.

The Adept GUI is created with DHTML, so the look and feel to the panels and their decorations can be completely altered by changing a style sheet and a few images. KISS is the key here.

Inside the panel, below the optional menu and button bar, is the window to the application. It will be loaded when the panel loads. While it is a browser window and can be reloaded on demand, Adept provides facilities for update without reload.

• A panel close command just hides the panel so that a re-open will display it quickly without a reload (unless needed).
• Buttons and links post and get through a hidden frame so that the page with these action objects does not have to reload. The server can update the display of the calling or other related window.
• Adept provides many facilities to update dynamic displays using DHTML, that can be driven by server or client as the needs arise. It is possible, for example, to insert, remove or update rows in a table without redisplaying the whole page.