From: Curt Hibbs <curt@...>
Date: 2005-02-26T07:55:02+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT] Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications

James G. Britt wrote:
>
> On Sat, 26 Feb 2005 06:45:34 +0900, Curt Hibbs <curt@hibbs.com> wrote:
> > I always have trouble remembering whether its HttpXmlRequest, or
> > XmlHttpRequest. In either case, its a poor moniker for such a
> promising web
> > app technique.
>
>
> It's not a technique per se, it's a the name of a JavaScript object
> for doing sync/async calls from the browser to to server.  Been around
>  since the last century, first as part of  Internet Explorer, then
> Mozilla.

I know, but it hasn't gotten much attention until Google wowed us with
Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Suggest. Ta-Da Lists uses this too, but its a
one-off solution specific to that web app.

> > Well, it turns out someone *has* given it a name: Ajax (for Asynchronous
> > JavaScript + XML). You can read about it here:
>
> What struck me about this article was a)  it's sort of pretentious,
> unless there is some reasonably  robust dev lib to go with it, since
> people have been doing this for some time now, and b) you can't tell,
> as there appears to be no code released, except what you can decipher
> from your browser when poking around "Google suggest".
>
> BTW, I've done some work on a JSON-RPC ORB thing (called Roy, after
> Roy Orbison) that builds off of the Ruby JSON-parsing code from
> Florain Frank.  It makes this sort of JavaScript Xml request stuff
> with Ruby server-code quite trivial.   You register services using
> Needle and call them from the browser.
>
> I need to gem it up for a nice release so people can find bugs and stuff.

Nice!

What I think we'll see someday, a new set of smart components integrated
into web app frameworks that render GUI components in the browser that
automatically know how to talk to their corresponding server-side objects
for behind-the-scenes data transfer. This would make it much easier to build
web apps whose GUI is as responsive as a desktop app (well... at least
closer).

I'd love to see someone do this with Rails.

Curt