CSDN front Page Headlines Wijmo 5 CTO: From Web to Mobile, my 25 years of programming career

The 52-year-old Bernardo Castilho, the CTO of ComponentOne, a grapecity (Chinese name for grape), is full of fun and rigor and a sense of history in his conversation.

As a young man, we worship the goddess of all kinds of entertainment, his idol is the world's most outstanding scientists, from the beginning of childhood, programming became his hobby, and eventually became his career for a lifetime. As one of the leader of the Wijmo 5 development team, he is an expert in many technologies such as HTML5 and JavaScript, and before interviewing him, the author has launched a question solicitation activity in the CSDN forum, Next, Let's take a look at Bernardo Mr. Castilho to answer questions about himself, his team, and Wijmo.

Figure: Grapecity ComponentOne CTO Bernardo Mr. Castilho

CSDN: First of all, please introduce yourself to our readers to share some of your little gossip. What are the impressive experiences that have been experienced since the profession? What experiences are shared from the Web to the mobile?

Bernardo Castilho: My programming career dates back to my teenage years when I was using a 45k memory Apple II, and I was fascinated by the programming's like that made everything incredibly simple. When I wrote my first custom control for Visual Basic 1.0 in the early 90, this hobby became my lifelong career.

All along, I have been very fond of reading, if I have to choose one, I would recommend Hofstadter's "Del, Escher, Bach: Set the Big", in the strict sense, it is not a programming book, but it covers all the fields, including everything connected to many areas. I also have a lot of idols, such as Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Gauss, von Neumann, Alan Spirit, etc., but in my life, I most admire the person is Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C # and Typescript creator-Anders Heilsberg, I've attended many of his speeches, and his unique insights and ideas always amaze me.

Over the past 25 years of my career, I have been fortunate to have witnessed the complete course of the Web Revolution, which has evolved from a genius idea of the last century into an integral part of today's lives, from cross-platform applications that publish content to one platform and run it all at once. personally, the most important turning point from the web to the mobile is Microsoft's decision to stop developing Silverlight, which allows me to see that HTML5 and JavaScript will be the technological trends of the future.

From the beginning of my career in this industry, everything has become interesting, looking back, people invented the personal computer and the World Wide Web, a lot of surprises in the world have a dramatic impact on real life. And today, at the risk of nagging like an old man, I see a lot of young kids wasting their time on the ipad, while adults rewardcash octopus on social networks like Facebook, and even people fret about what color their next phone is going to pick. Of course, there are still a lot of interesting things going on here, but not yet known. For me, EcmaScript 5, TypeScript, Angularjs, and Wijmo 5 are all exceptionally interesting and hopefully more people will love them.

CSDN: Please specify what is Wijmo 5? Why is it named "Five"?

Bernardo Castilho: Wijmo 5 is a new generation of Html5/javascript Control library with the latest and most popular technology, including all the controls and components needed to develop modern MVVM applications that run on desktops and mobile devices, and is no longer compatible with any traditional browser. We will still continue to support and update Wijmo 3 so that users of traditional browsers can continue to use it.

Wijmo 5 's "Five" actually comes from ECMAScript 5. A very important feature in Wijmo 5 is the real implementation of support for getter and setter properties, which is a new addition to ECMAScript 5 and something that has been lacking in earlier versions of Wijmo.

CSDN: Please talk about the members of the Wijmo 5 development team and the Division of labor.

Bernardo Castilho: Most of the Wijmo 5 team is also responsible for other product development work. We use our expertise in our respective fields to create the best quality controls for each category of development project.

As far as I am concerned, I was responsible for the development of all versions of FlexGrid from ActiveX, WinForms to XAML and so on, and I had a lot of experience in grid, and brought them to the development of Wijmo 5 FlexGrid. Alex Trefilov is a developer of the Wijmo 5 Flexchart control, who has been responsible for the development of the XAML chart control, which can be said to be an expert in charting. Tim Emanuel is our main designer and CSS expert who created the appearance and layout behavior of the Wijmo control and the less file that makes it easy to create new control themes.

Chris Bannon is Wijmo's product manager and is responsible for the development of Wijmo all editions, including Wijmo 5. Chris is definitely a connoisseur in web development, HTML5, JavaScript, and all popular JavaScript technologies and controls including jquery, SVG, Bootstrap, AngularJS, Knockoutjs, and more. He has invested a lot of effort in understanding the most advanced Web development technologies and how to develop and develop them today. Alex Ivanenko is our project manager responsible for infrastructure work including build processes, automated testing, bug management, and user requests. All of the demo examples of Wijmo 5 were developed by Raleigh Johnson, Nazim Turakulov is the developer of our interactive layer, including ANGULARJS and Knockoutjs directives. Kim Landis is our technical documentation engineer who is responsible for the review of documentation, technical paper blogs, etc. to ensure that all information is concise and clear. The marketing manager, Eve Turzillo, is responsible for promotional work including advertising, video, conferences and more. In addition, we also have a development team in countries such as China and the United States, and responsible for the development of Wijmo 3 and Wijmo 5 products.

What technologies are used in the development of Csdn:wijmo 5? What is the specific development idea?

Bernardo Castilho:2013, when we saw through ECMAScript 5, HTML5, TypeScript, When new web technologies such as Angularjs are able to create HTML tools that are as powerful as those in Silverlight and. NET, we decided to develop WIJMO 5. We want to create a library where our customers are accustomed to smaller, less dependent platforms that provide them with the same powerful functionality and flexibility of the controls. We used jquery but did not include the jquery UI, Raphael, globalize, or other libraries.

We want these controls to take full advantage of the features that HTML5 runs anywhere, so all control designs are designed to work well on mobile/touchscreen and desktop devices.

Figure: Wijmo 5 Design Sketch

Wijmo 5, written in typescript language, incorporates all the benefits of object-oriented programming including classes, inheritance, and compiles to ECMAScript 5, enabling it to run in all modern browsers. In addition, the typescript provides static error checking that greatly accelerates development and provides product quality.

The Wijmo 5 control has a very rich object model that leverages our experience as a control developer to reduce the customer learning curve, based on existing controls on our other platforms. Also, we migrated from Silverlight the missing classes from the JavaScript stack, including the control and event base classes that Icollectionview the key interfaces with MVVM.

CSDN: How long has this tool been working? What pits have you encountered?

Bernardo Castilho: It took us a year to develop Wijmo 5, the whole process can be said to be smooth, but also encountered some challenges, and the biggest challenge is documentation , We were eager to find tools like JSDoc to compile code comments into the online Help system, but with no work, we wrote ourselves a tool to extract annotations from the source and generate XML files that support localization. In addition, there is a tool dedicated to compiling XML files into a Help system together with a Web page, so that whenever Wijmo is built, our help site can be automatically updated. In contrast, other problems are much easier.

What are the differences between Csdn:wijmo 5 and Wijmo in nature? What are the advantages of WIJMO 5 compared to similar tools?

Bernardo Castilho:wijmo 5 is very different from many previous versions of Wijmo and is completely incompatible, it contains a series of distinct controls, different architectures, and most crucially, it no longer supports traditional browsers. compared with other similar tools, Wijmo 5 controls are smaller, faster, and have a more affluent and easy-to-use object model, the entire Wijmo 5 library is 300k in size, similar products are usually about 10 times times larger than it, WIJMO control is not "widgets", It's really a real control, with better performance.

CSDN: What are the future plans for Wijmo 5? Would you consider open source?

Bernardo Castilho: We don't have the Wijmo 5 open source program, instead we will sell Wijmo 5 at a very competitive price and provide user support. For the future of Wijmo 5, we have a roadmap and a list of user requests, and after we release beta, we'll summarize the information we've collected into a prioritized list of what we can do to make a specific implementation plan.

CSDN: Many developers are concerned about whether angular is having problems integrating with other popular components?

Bernardo Castilho: support for angular is actually one of the key projects developed by Wijmo 5, we love angularjs and use it in most of the examples, and, We also provide instructions to make it easier to use Wijmo 5 with Angularjs. In addition, for the control itself, Wijmo 5 also has a CollectionView class that enables MVVM development using ANGULARJS to reach the level of the XAML platform.

CSDN: What if the developer wants to migrate the project from Wijmo to Wijmo 5?

Bernardo Castilho: Migrating from Wijmo to Wijmo 5 is easy, and if the developer uses ANGULARJS and MVVM, the project migration can be done by making minor adjustments to the control class and instructions to perform the old swap. Of course, we are very happy to provide users with migration guidance, on the official website of the newsgroup section contains Wijmo and other topics related information, for developers is absolutely very practical.

Figure: Wijmo 5 Code

CSDN: In the introduction of Wijmo 5, there is a "real JavaScript control", can you tell me what it means?

Bernardo Castilho: in the literal sense, "control" refers to a reusable soft member with a user interface and an object model that contains properties, events, methods, and so on. Most JavaScript libraries provide components (widgets) that are very similar to controls, except that the performance of a component has a single, but rather difficult, "Options" object, and that they use a string that invokes a method or attaches an event handler, leading to lengthy and error-prone syntax.

Wijmo 5, however, is completely different, enabling attributes such as getter and setter to support real events and methods. All object models are type-safe, and developers benefit from IntelliSense and Typescript compilers. Most importantly, the WIJMO 5 syntax is as concise as the JavaScript class, and the code is easier to write, read, and understand.

Can CSDN:WIJMO 5 controls be adaptive based on the device or browser? How versatile is it?

Bernardo Castilho: The WIJMO 5 controls support all devices, including phones, tablets, and PCs, and can be seamlessly integrated, regardless of the layout frame the developer chooses to use. For example, most of our examples use bootstrap to implement adaptive layouts, which ensures that applications not only run on small-screen devices, but also adapt, and of course, some examples use other frameworks, such as Ionic, which are dedicated to developing hybrid applications. Wijmo does not provide layout services, but it can be easily integrated into Wijmo whether the developer chooses Bootstrap, ionic, or any other CSS library.

What technical support does Csdn:wijmo 5 have in China? How can Chinese developers ask for help if they are having problems?

Bernardo Castilho: We will provide first-class service support for developers from China. Our parent company Grapecity has branches in Shanghai and Xian in China, and much of the work on the development of Wijmo 5 is done in China. If the developers from China have any questions about Wijmo, they can be presented at the grapecity forum , and our developers will be able to help them in a timely manner.

CSDN: As a senior programmer, can you talk about your views on html5/javascript technology trends?

Bernardo Castilho: In my opinion,EcmaScript 5, TypeScript, ANGULARJS and other technology updates have made HTML5 and JavaScript the most efficient and practical platform for application development. EcmaScript 5 introduces the most important getter and setter attributes and support for SVG, Canvas, JSON, and so on, before this version, EcmaScript is not strong enough. Typescript also adds a number of key elements, in addition to object-oriented, there are static error checks that save time and improve code quality. ANGULARJS provides a rich set of MVVM and Web Components, both of which are a critical part of modern application development, and although ANGULARJS does not have the same capabilities, it is one of the most popular technologies of the moment.

CSDN: Recently in China, there is a very hot topic, that is, Adobe closed the research and Development Branch in China, only the sales department, one of the important reason is that for the Chinese people, the genuine software is too expensive, for grapecity control, Will you adjust the price of the Chinese market to suit China's national conditions?

Bernardo Castilho: We've had a lot of internal discussions about pricing, and most people think that the current price is quite appropriate, while others want to be able to add a less expensive option with limited or reduced support. What kind of price should I offer to developers in China? We are still thinking about all of this. At the same time, according to the feedback of our business team in China, Chinese enterprise users attach great importance to technical services, so in the Chinese market, we will provide local technical support, as well as telephone, mail response and other value-added services to help developers get a better experience.

CSDN: Is there anything you want to say to Chinese developers?

Bernardo Castilho: I encourage all Chinese developers interested in HTML5 and JavaScript to visit our official website to learn about Wijmo 5, where you can not only download Wijmo 5, but also videos, samples, documents, Forums to get you in-depth understanding of WIJMO 5. I also hope that developers from China can contact us directly in English or Chinese, get more information, or give us suggestions to help us make WIJMO 5 better!

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WIJMO 5 Civil Service network: HTTP://WIJMO.GCPOWERTOOLS.COM.CN/5

Wijmo 5 Chinese Community: http://gcdn.gcpowertools.com.cn/showforum-140.html

CSDN front Page Headlines Wijmo 5 CTO: From Web to Mobile, my 25 years of programming career