In most cases, existing Block Mode, GUI or Browser applications can use Rapide with minimal changes.
Rapide has been architected to support existing Gen Screen, GUI and Browser designs without requiring changes to the basic model design, and it supports many Gen GUI features that are not supported in standard Gen web generation, for example global allocation of local views, most dot notation methods and the Rapide runtime has been designed to replicate the behaviour of the Gen GUI runtime.
Dialog Design
Traditional Gen GUI applications run in a windowed mode, often with multiple modal or modeless dialog boxes, and have consequently been designed for a desktop environment where many separate windows and dialog boxes can be visible on the desktop and the user can easily switch between the various open windows and dialog boxes.
Browser applications on the other hand are often displayed as 'full screen' within the browser and do not provide a simple way of switching between various dialogs. Traditionally this has therefore required the Gen developer to make substantial changes to the dialog flows and window designs to accommodate a full screen mode that only displays one window at a time.
To minimise changes to complex GUI designs, Rapide provides a choice of whether a browser based application runs in 'full screen' or 'desktop mode'. In desktop mode, the windows and dialog boxes appear as resizeable windows within the browser frame, with the browser effectively replacing the desktop.
Bitmaps
To assist in migrating from GUI to Browser, Rapide allows you to use existing windows bmp images without conversion as well as other popular formats like gif, png and jpeg.
There are a few unsupported features due to platform differences.