You're not considering the use of that, are you?
Slick is nice and all that, but if it's as pokey as your average Java
GUI, and as huge and bloaty as you've described, I don't know if that's
such a great idea.
I thought one of the benefits of using something like AJAX was that it
reduced network traffic (by only requesting the information you want), but
increased responsivness (by putting most of the UI logic in the browser,
rather than across a network). If you're going to toss all of that away
for 'slick', well... hokay.
If you *really* want to find some way to improve the current Web
interface, I could recommend a series of things.
1. Anywhere in your C code that you find yourself writing HTML tags,
remove those tags. Ideally, you ought to create an XML schema and deliver
XML files instead, but if you really want to hate XML as deeply as I
suspect, at least recode this stuff to output CSV-formatted information
(or the like). Just stop hard-coding your HTML in the C code.
2. Change your current use of AJAX to create the HTML code from the data
generated by #1. If you're using XML, you can apply an XSL file to the
data. This allows consumers of Citadel to create their own look-n-feel
more easily. If you want to stay away from XML due to a deeply rooted
hatred of it, use JavaScript files that a user can modify so they can
provide their own modifications if they want.
3. Work out some way to change easyinstall so that it doesn't 'update'
the HTML-ish stuff unless the user specifically requests in some fashion.
If you used XML, it'll probably be easier to code the XSL sheets to
degrade gracefully to older ways of doing things (unless you go radical on
some future changes), but any new content provided by the WebCit server
could be used when the consumer updates their own XSL sheets to make use
of the new information however they want to (if they want to). Meanwhile,
you could update the 'default' to make use of the update without issue..
new users, or those users who want to use the default can get the update.
I dunno if I'm making sense in how I'm writing it, but the basic idea is
to better separate the data (served by WebCit) from the presentation
(served by AJAX, HTML, and so on).
