Recap of Windows, Stages, and Panels


What is a window?

A window is any tab or floating object you see with a title bar. What truly defines a window element are the controls to navigate forward and backward, and to reload the current page.

What is a stage?

Stages are locations that can contain windows. You can direct a page to a given stage using the attribute 'windowStage'.

Simply put, a stage is an area that can contain windows. By default there are two stages you can use; the 'defaultStage' which is the stage this tutorial is loaded into and the 'floatingStage' that contains floating windows. There is also a third stage loaded called the 'SuperStage' in which all of the Technology Explorer content is loaded into. You should NEVER send content to this stage.

As an aside there is a stage loaded in the right panel of the tutorial that is the default stage for tutorial content. A stage is also used in the bottom panel of the Ad Hoc query to display the results within.

What is a panel?

To actually display content you need to define a 'panel'. Panels have the ability to load and display data from the server, and refresh themselves. Panels can also load other layouts, or raw data. They will can page titles, and build and promote menus for a given page. Basically, panels take care of getting your content on the screen.

Color scheme reminder: