Praveen Ray wrote: >>> Most geeks make lousy web designers and would rather fiddle >>> with the back end server code than CSS and javascript. > >>I agree that I'm a lousy designer, but in this day Javascript (and CSS > to some >>extent) are becoming more and more important. Javascript is a real > programming >>language relegating it to be the work of web designers is why there's > so much >>crappy Javascript code out there today. I feel that you're really doing > yourself >>a disservice to not learn it and learn it well. > > all the more reasons for UI controls to exist. These hide javascript and > even handlers from the designers altogether. The real value is in > delivering one chunk of code which contains all it needs - javascript, > C# , CSS, images. Drop this chunk in right place and you're instantly > creating a sortable, pageable, selectable grid. Why build the wheel when > you can buy it for less than $500.00 ?
This is a viable option when you have more money than time. But the minute you want to do something that your widget retailer hasn't already done before then you're in trouble. GWT (Google's Java toolkit for AJAX apps) tried to completely hide all Javascript from the programmer but they got a lot of complaints because of the things people were trying to do but couldn't. So they now added a way so that the server side can add literal Javascript to the outgoing request. Basically putting the JS into a string that GWT spit out on the other side. Reminds me of the old days of people sprinkling their HTML in strings throughout the CGI programs. It was bad then and it's bad now. Anytime you try to wrap something complex and featureful (like Javascript) so that developers don't see it you have to do 1 of 2 things: 1) Allow only a subset of functionality 2) Make your wrapper just as complex as the thing it's wrapping. #1 is ok if you only care about that subset (I will almost never care about register details that compilers hide from me). #2 is just all around bad since you have to learn the complexity of the thing anyway, just with some bad wrapper interface instead of the real one. -- Michael Peters Developer Plus Three, LP
