From: Dion Almaer <dion@...>
Date: 2005-02-26T08:20:54+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT] Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications

I have been doing a lot of work w/ Ajax, and the server side action piece.

I think that Rails is perfectly suited for this task, and am really looking
forward to taking some of our work and building our Rails based components.

A web developer shouldn't have to know much to switch their app from
traditional Big Request -> Big Response Rendering to Ajax.

This is exciting stuff, but, of course, we need to be wary about going hog
wild and making everything Ajax and freaking out our users, who have learned
over many years on the web that the SUBMIT button is king ;)

Dion

Ps. Maybe there should be a sub-project of Rails for components like this.
There is a core framework piece, where you can specify standard XML
responses which the client side grabs as a DOM and does certain things (runs
Javascript functions, twiddles content in the DOM, adds into the DOM, etc
etc). I would love to work on this with people.
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Curt Hibbs [mailto:curt@hibbs.com] 
Sent: Friday, February 25, 2005 4:55 PM
To: ruby-talk ML
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