Demo Documentation

Overview

The Communicator Demo you've just seen has three core components, focusing on SuiteTools, Communicator Preview and View Source Magazine. This documentation will examine the creation of each of these documents through careful annotation of the source code.

If you'd like, you may jump now to the documentation dealing with any of these sections:

The demo window itself is opened and positioned thanks to Java. The code below determines your computer's screen resolution, and automatically positions a 640x480 Navigator window at the center of your screen:

v <script language="JavaScript1.2"> var tool = java.awt.Toolkit; var size = new java.awt.Dimension(tool.getDefaultToolkit().getScreenSize()); var swidth = size.width var sheight = size.height var myWin = window.open('home.html','layerdemo','left=-1,top=-1,width=640,height=480'); myWin.moveTo((swidth-640)/2,(sheight-480)/2) </script>

Along the way, we did enounter some difficulties with accomodating feature gaps in early beta releases of Communicator. As a result, some of the code in this demo would probably be written differently were we targeting the final shipping version of Communicator for our client platform. The demo was designed to work best under Communicator P3, which is found on this CD.

Interesting to note is that while the demo is positioned and laid out very precisely, at no time did we use any tables or clear spacer GIF images. For too long, these have been the tools of Web developers seeking to carefully position items on a Web page. As you'll see through this documentation, the ability to use absolute positing in Communicator is not only a giant leap forward, but also a cinch to learn and implement.

As you explore building your own network-centric applications using the new Netscape ONE technology supported in Communicator, borrow and adapt code from this demo to speed your development process.