Future way of using AJAX

[Kevin Cho]

I'm curious about how you think about AJAX programming in near future. For now, I am familiar w/ scriptaculous and prototype. But, for programming languages like Ruby, Java, and etc... are writing a shell around dojo/scriptaculous and to use it, the programmer does not need to directly interface w/ the JavaScript. On one side of the coin, I do see the benefits of this when a programmer is not familiar with AJAX. Then the other side of coin, you're stuck with the features they provide and stuck on specific versions of prototype/scriptaculos/dojo. Anyways, I'm sure those frameworks will have more features down the road. So, my question is do you think that down the road there will be less programmers interfacing w/ JavaScript and interfacing directly with their native language?

[Peter Svensson]

Hi sg707,

No, I think that more and more programmers will use frameworks, since the alternative is to create one from scratch and reinvent the wheel. The reason for this is basically Internet Explorer - you need some kind of abstraction to deal with cross-browser issues, or your code will become very long and unmaintainable indeed!

I do not see a future where people pretend that they are developing a single-machine program, which then gets compiled and generated into a client-server system, which is what GWT, Icefaces, et.c. are doing.

I see on the other hand that developers will be of two types; front-end and back-end and that their day jobs rarely meet. This will make it easier for each type to keep up with new technologies, and changes to the client need not affect the logic on the server (or the build of it) and the other way around.

I have developed a theory called "Thin Server Architecture", which is similar to, but more general than Ganesh Prasad's SOFEA (Service-Oriented Front-End Architecture). The basic premise is to avoid all sort of server-side templating and only use the server as a source of raw data. The client is loaded as a normal html file and auhtenticates, loads data etc. from the server.

Here is my latest talk, which I made in Portugal a couple of weeks ago;

http://codebits.sapo.pt/intra/s/speaker/10

TSA has nothing to do with Dojo, but is in my opinion the best way to use an Ajax framework.

Cheers,
PS

http://unclescript.blogspot.com/

[Eric Pascarello]

"sg707"

Please check you Private Messages

Thanks,
Eric

[Kevin Cho]

Originally posted by Eric Pascarello:
"sg707"

Please check you Private Messages

Thanks,
Eric

Done~ I'm hoping I win! never played w/ dojo since I heard that scriptaculous and dojo can't be combined. However, I'll be more than willing to learn from your book!

Thanks for the response Peter. I agree with you about single platform language for all. Every time I read a web framework like "Ruby on Rails", they heavily empathizes the point that they can do AJAX the "EASY" way. Still, some features they have are very tempting to use. For example Ruby on Rail's AJAX auto-complete retrieves the value from database, creates javascript needed, and even gives you default css visual as well in less than 2 lines of coding. To me, this was amazing but knowing the limitation of pre-built AJAX features I still use AJAX Framework today. But, if they keep adding more features and I'm satifisfied then, I might jump in their bandwagon.

[Bear Bibeault]

Originally posted by Kevin Cho:
never played w/ dojo since I heard that scriptaculous and dojo can't be combined.

Some relevant discussion on that matter here.

[Peter Svensson]

Hi Kevin,

There is actualyl another Ajax toolkitthat combine the scaffolding auto-generation of RoR with a clean and editable MVC client and server framework, and which is simple to use with RoR as well.

This is actually not Dojo, though But JavascriptMVC;

http://javascriptmvc.com/wiki/index.php?title=Getting_Started#Creating_Hello_World

Dojo is much more feature complete, but jMVC have a lot of very good ideas that I hope to see implemented in Dojo, specifically client-side MVC Scaffolding and other things.

Cheers,
PS