brasato framework - Frequently Asked Questions

The core has been running since 2004 in the OLAT LMS web application with hundreds of concurrent users. The improvements may of course contain bugs. Just check the issue tracking to see the issue list. Bugs will be fixed quickly.

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What are the three modes that each user of a brasato application can choose from?

Web 1.0 mode is the standard full-page mode. It sends a whole page on each request.

Web 2.0 mode is the partial screen update mode (Web 2.0 is a bit wide as a notion, you could also call it AJAX mode or Partial-Screen-Update mode). Each request is sent to a hidden iframe (both GET and POST requests) and the answer from the server is JSON which will be assigned to a variable (no "eval" needed here) and interpreted through a javascript function. The main interpreter tasks are to manipulate the DOM tree and to execute scripts.

Web 2a is some term that we came up with. we mean a Web 1.0 mode with accessibility improvements especially for screenreaders such as

- generate different html fragments (e.g. for reordering of content)

- use a different and aural css

- have a different render kit (collection of component renderers)

- have different workflows (workflows which adjust depending on the mode)

- allowing full screen mode to expand the current part of interest to the full screen, avoiding boring rereading of navigation items

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Can I use AJAX within Brasato?

Of course, since Brasato has the Web 2.0 mode which is AJAX by offering partial screen update and poll/push mechanism. The design of the framework is such that you normally don't need to hassle with javascript - but you can if you want or need to for advanced features.

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Does Brasato support internationalization?

Yes, through the use of standard Java LocalStrings files, which always reside in the same class folder as the java code that needs it. The webpage itself is always encoded in UTF-8 and converts content with other encoding to UTF-8. The online debug mode allows you to change missing or wrong translation on the screen without having to search in the code.

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What means Brasato?

Brasato is italian and means roast. We thought this to be a good name for a framework which evolved from a real world web application over several years - indeed a piece of code which roasted for a long time.

Now the time has come to serve it!

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What is OLAT?

OLAT means Online Learning And Training, and it is an Open Source LMS developed by the University of Zurich. We saw in 2003 that we needed a framework for those complex and collaborative interactions OLAT offers - but at this time none of the existing open-source frameworks could support us enough - so that is why we built our own.

Brasato is the extraction and further improvement of the GUI part of the OLAT framework.

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Are there books about Brasato?

Not yet.

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Technical

Can I use JSF within Brasato?

We plan to provide a wrapper component for JSF Facelets. See the roadmap. For now, you could create url matching patterns (web.xml) which resolve to JSF and others which call Brasato.

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Where is the application state stored?

The application state is stored on the server, and depending on the workflows, it uses some ten kbytes of RAM in the JVM per user.

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Does Brasato have continuations?

We have concepts like a modal dialog where you register as listener, and receive a later event from this dialog.

This achieves what some people call continuations without complex and mysterious exception throwing and thread suspension. Since the state and the component tree reside on the server, you have full control over where and when you stop and continue a flow.

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