On Dec 26, 2005, at 11:50 AM, Jeff wrote:
I have been wondering recently about separation of presentation and
data in the context of AJAX - whilst keeping the presentation still
server-side. Anyone doing anything interesting in this space with
mod_perl?
I've been working on an AJAX heavy site thats nearing completion for
a while now (so long, AJAX didn't exist when i started it. i called
it xmlhttprequest, and people said i was stupid).
i just run all of the data handling stuff from a /service/ directory
and offer multpiple ways to access it
?f(ormat)=json - JSON serialized objects
?f=xml - XML data structures
?f=xhtml - XHTML chunks that are used to entirely replace sections
of a page
the service modules are basically mirrors of page view modules --
except they only return a dataobject or error codes. since
everything on my project is oop, there's little actual code on the
page generation
I tried this project in a bunch of languages before setting on
mod_perl - php, python, rails -- i've actually found mod_perl to be
the easist and most straightforward way to do anything 'ajax' related.
it doesn't do the automagic js generation like some rails things do,
but I dislike a lot of that code.
I think a server presentation later/filter, has to be preferred to
complex client-side Javascript rendering engines? Javascript is a
PITA to code and debug, and there are too many buggy versions out
there.
Just use MochiKit ( http://www.mochikit.org ). aside from plugging a
friend's project, its f*ing amazing and REALLY simplifies and cuts
down JS coding (and debugging with its built in error logging).
The one issue with it though, is that the whitespace stripped version
is 70k ! - you can use a script inside the SVN trunk to make a
custom stripped version that only has certain elements -- I just use
Base and Async which make up 25k , to handle all of my data fetching/
parsing
On Dec 26, 2005, at 1:43 PM, Joachim Zobel wrote:
One thing I have in mind is that this way it should be easy to move
stuff between client and server. I have a TAL implementation in
Javascript (http://www.heute-morgen.de/test/domtal.html -
attention, no
serious testing yet, no xml usage either) and I would like to put
Petal
into the filtering presentation layer.
Check out all of the above in this:
http://mochikit.org/examples/ajax_tables/index.html
