Michael McGrady wrote:
Thought I'd pass on to the Struts list the great success and popularity Frank Zammetti's ideas are having on the Cocoon list.
Ahem...
I'm very sorry, but the ajaxification of Cocoon has *nothing* to do with Frank Zametti's ideas. These ideas are *mine* and I *never heard of Frank before*. You should have read the detailed description of my work [1] to understand how different they are from Frank's very classical use of XHR (nothing original here - there are plenty of similar articles around).
I took a completely different approach, requiring absolutely no page-specific client-side JS code. The use of XHR is totally transparent and the page writer doesn't have to care about it.
Client-side JS detects the availability of XHR in the host browser and uses it if it exists. Otherwise, a regular form post is done. On the server side, when answering to an XHR request, Cocoon produces partial page update directives, just by adding an additional transformer (it's a filter in Cocoon parlance) to the production pipeline of the regular full page. These update directives are then parsed by the client-side JS to update page parts that need to be updated.
The result is that, using a small generic client-side JS library (approx 200 lines with comments etc), you can ajaxify any kind of form or page with most often nothing to do in page templates. And it degrades gracefully to full-page reloads on non ajax-aware browsers.
This is a very productive approach that avoids most classical problems of Ajax: there's no need for a lot client-side JS code that is difficult to make really cross-browser, difficult to test, avoids opening too many entry points in the application that could create security holes.
So please, rather than taking attribution when it's totally unjustified, consider learning from other's ideas.
Sylvain
[1] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=xml-cocoon-dev&m=111348478712544&w=2
-- Sylvain Wallez Anyware Technologies http://apache.org/~sylvain http://anyware-tech.com Apache Software Foundation Member Research & Technology Director
