[Cosmo-dev] Account signup box dilemma

[Matthew Eernisse]

I've run into a bit of dilemma with unifying the account-signup process 
with faux-modal-dialog box from the Snarf server bundle.

We want to us it in Cosmo as well -- both from the login page and from 
the anon access page for viewing shared collections. The idea was to 
take the plain ol' JS/DOM/CSS code from the original dialog and merge it 
into the nifty Dojo widget we now have for modal dialogs. The wee 
problem I've run into is that along with the convenience we get out of 
using the Dojo widget framework for UI elements, we also get a 
dependency -- Dojo itself.

If we want to use the same Dojo-widgetized component both in Cosmo 
itself as well as in Snarf,  It seems like we'll have to do one of two 
things:

1. Clue Snarf in to the location of the dojo library and our widget code 
in Cosmo (That might be making assumptions about port numbers that we 
don't want to make -- remember any synchronous XHR calls used by 
dojo.require don't work cross-domain.)
2. Ship a copy of our widget code -- and Dojo too, yay! -- in Snarf

Are there other ways to skin this cat? Maybe ship Snarf with just the 
compressed dojo.js file, and the pieces/parts of our code that we need 
for the dialog box?

The other option (which isn't really my preference actually) would be to 
blow off Dojo widgets and just use straight JS/DOM/CSS (currently two JS 
files 19K and 9.7K respectively for the original fake dialog box). That 
would avoid the big ol' Dojo dependency, but would be kind of missing 
the whole point of "plug and playness" and reusability that's one of the 
main reason we're going down the widget path in the first place.

Anybody have any ideas on how to solve this in a way that doesn't make 
configuration really annoying/brittle, and also doesn't duplicate a 
bunch of code?


Matthew