Speaking as a guy that's been there, done that (including using IE specific hacks in iframes and MSXML's 'Data Islands' at various points in a misspent career), AJAX is just another battlefront in the war between the 'distribute the workload' and the 'keep it in the datacenter' crowds. Neither is correct, they both have their place, but JavaScript, DOM and CSS do not AJAX make. the Asynchronous XML is the really key element in an AJAX app.
I've actually seen an app billed as 'AJAX' that literally sent the entire dataset down the line in the original .html, preformatted in hidden DIV tags, and then JavaScript and DOM rewriting to give a 'live' response behaviour. Not a single callback to the server until the POST of the form. Nothing AJAX, not even any XML implementation (and in truth some pretty trivial, but poorly written JavaScript).
Interestingly, this whole conversation kinda makes me laugh. WO is well suited to AJAX, even behind the scenes, using DirectActions to return XML to an ASYNC request, where the user would have no idea it was a WO app. Using static .html content pages and WO to generate the XML that is represented back to the user via the DOM. Oh, wait, that's how the Apple iTunes Music Store works. those neat little scrollers ? DHTML behaviours with AJAX implemented calls to the WO server to get the next items in the list.
Andy On Mar 29, 2006, at 2:13 PM, Paul Lynch wrote:
Starting with WebObjects in '96 was the first time that the transactional nature of http was brought home to me, despite a few years of perl and Ted Shelton's (ITS) OO web product, whatever it was called; quite a few techniques learnt programming CICS almost 20 years before came in handy. Client-server (and n-tier) has been and gone so many times in the 90s alone; I wonder if people will ever conclude that it's a matter of resource allocation rather than fundamental application design. Kids today, huh?Paul _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Webobjects-dev mailing list ([email protected]) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/webobjects-dev/dru% 40druware.comThis email sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
_______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Webobjects-dev mailing list ([email protected]) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/webobjects-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to [email protected]
