Hi Ted/Frank, Well, The first project I did in the industry,(I was a trainee then) in 2000 was a full scale ajax(of course,we called it something else) project. Ajax was used out of compulsion.We had a gigantic user entry form with around 100 controls;which was divided into 5 tabs, which were actually layers/divs. It could not be one single page\form due to constraints of user experience; and it could not be five different jsps because the tabs had inter-related field validation rules. We used ajax for populating dependendent combo boxes and showing error messages based on server side validations.It did not make sense to post the whole gigantic form for showing an error message.I still dont see how we could have done that without ajax.The challenges were kind of similar to DOJO users of today.Large javascript files made the pages heavier to load. Otherwise, it worked out quite well. By the way, have any of you done any performance metrics on an ajax based implementation vs a non ajax based one? rgds Rahul
-----Original Message----- From: Frank W. Zammetti [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2007 10:25 AM To: Struts Users Mailing List Cc: Struts Users Mailing List Subject: Re: struts1 or struts 2? On Thu, August 9, 2007 8:24 am, Ted Husted wrote: > IMHO, if we had today's JavaScript/CSS/HTML environment available to > us in 1998, then JSP, ASP, JSF, PHP, and all the rest of it, would not > exist. We did all these things to make up for the shortcomings of the > client-side environment, and, since then, the key shortcomings have > been addressed. Great observation IMO, and it couldn't be more true. I always like to tell the story of a Java users group I was at maybe two years ago now... the speaker was talking about AJAX and he said that the people who know what AJAX is at that point are the same people who are pissed about it because frankly it hasn't been anything new for them for some time! I have one app that was put in production in 1998 ironically, the year you picked here Ted, that you'd look at today and say it was AJAX, an RIA, but it didn't use what we'd call AJAX now (hidden iFrame that got Javascript back which executed upon return and automatically updated and hide and showed a variety of DIVs on the page... in fact, this is the extreme case because absolutely every view the user can ever see in the app is loaded up front and never generated server-side, it's only data being plugged into fields after startup). If I'd have thought for one second that what I was doing was any big deal, unusual in some way, it could have been my name going down in history as having invented AJAX instead of Jesse James Garrett! And the worse part is I know I'm not the only one that can say that! LOL I've had the interesting experience of witnessing an evolution here at work... in 1998, I was the only one building apps in that fashion at this company, everyone else was very much at the other extreme, the whole "let the server do everything" approach as you described, thin pages, etc. Everyone thought I was nuts (I only got away with it because my projects are always successful, something not everyone here can claim), I got into some really heated dehates with folks over the years about it too. Now, things are very much swinging the other way... apps are being built now in much more RIA ways, it's much more mainstream thinking. I think that evolution is playing itself out across many organizations now, and that's my point: there's a critical mass now, and the mindset is starting to change, and Ted's right, many of the technologies we're saddled with today would never have needed inventing if everyone had listened to me (or the others that were doing what I did in various orgamizations) back in 1998! LOL > -Ted. Frank -- Frank W. Zammetti Founder and Chief Software Architect Omnytex Technologies http://www.omnytex.com AIM/Yahoo: fzammetti MSN: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Author of "Practical Ajax Projects With Java Technology" (2006, Apress, ISBN 1-59059-695-1) and "JavaScript, DOM Scripting and Ajax Projects" (2007, Apress, ISBN 1-59059-816-4) Java Web Parts - http://javawebparts.sourceforge.net Supplying the wheel, so you don't have to reinvent it! --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
