On 14 Nov 2005, at 07:10, swrainey wrote:
Ajax is really hot right now and I could see loosing some developers
because it's not as on the forefront of the whole web 2.0 hyped up
junk. Ajax is more about usability than eye candy or at least it
should
be. That being said. I know I can use ajax really easy inside of a
django project but will anyone choose another framework based on most
of the other ones having "ajax support".
For me "Ajax support" really is pure marketing fluff - as far as I'm
concerned EVERY web framework supports Ajax unless it does something
truly moronic like refuse to let you output documents that don't have
the standard header/footer template.
That said, I know my way around JavaScript and prefer to write it by
hand. I imagine there are many developers out there who don't and
prefer having the framework do the work for them. The Ajax support in
Rails is my least favourite feature, precisely because I like to have
full control over how my JS works - but it makes a lot of Rails
developers very happy indeed.
At the very least, it is useful to have your framework make a few
decisions/recommendations for you - things like which XMLHttpRequest
cross-browser abstraction to use. I mould tend to look towards
MochiKit for that kind of thing since it's more Pythonic than other
JavaScript libraries, taking a lot of its ideas from Python features.
One thing that would be very cool would be some built in support in
Django for outputting JSON, which is a really neat format for sending
data to and from the server via XMLHttpRequest. Maybe a custom
template tag or filter would be useful here.
I know the Ajax in Django discussion has been going on for a long
time, but maybe it's time to take a closer look at it now that we're
thinking about features for 1.0. After all, in the ultra competitive
world of Web Frameworks marketing is important.
Cheers,
Simon
