Grzegorz Kossakowski skrev:
Sylvain Wallez napisał(a):
Grzegorz Kossakowski wrote:
The "IE gives me shudders" feeling is partly one of the reasons for Ajax
toolkits to exist. This unfortunately doesn't solve everything, but
helps a lot!
This only partly address my doubts. I really ask about the prospects for
AJAX. If I'm going to invest my time in learning AJAX toolkits I would
like to be sure that they are capable to do much more than flashy
examples. What's questionable for me if AJAX can become _platform_ for
building Rich Client Applications as we already would like to use it for
building such.
I agree that REST is great because it's more standard way of doing
things (HTTP-compliant) and in theory would both reduce server's load
and improve user's experience. I also can see that this reduces a
complexity a little bit because it's more client-server architecture and
no viewer-(server+view producer) as it's now. However, what I'm trying
to say is that reduced complexity on server's side does not only come
from building REST-style applications but also from moving some
significant part of whole complexity from the server to client.
The idea is that total complexity for a "rich" AJAX+REST application is
lower than for a "rich" MVC model 2 application. See
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/wa-ajaxarch/ for a
detailed argument for this.
So for me it is quite clear that the AJAX+REST architecture is very
promising. As I just have started to explore this way I have far to less
experience of it to know if the promise holds in practice yet.
Now it
becomes clear that we need tools and execution platform on the client side.
What we have now is only bunch of quite compatible and
standard-compliant browser's and IE. There are toolkits that try to
improve the situation but they still need to be run on IE and I fear
that we are going to hit their limits in near future. I would like to
see strong arguments that my doubts are just unjustified...
It is of course always hard to know with Microsoft. I actually build my
first (and this far only) Ajax widget (a lazy loading tree menu) on IE5
long before the technology was dubbed AJAX. At that time all other
browsers where far behind. Then Microsoft pulled the brake and stoped
development of IE for a long time.
Now there seem to be some reasons to hope that they take browser
development serious again. First they decided to consider browser update
security critical. So thanks to that the vast majority of users have a
modern browser now. And secondly they have given up their resistance and
have developed a cross browser Ajax framework
http://ajax.asp.net/Default.aspx which probably will make them more
motivated to make IE a good Ajax platform. But you never know about
their priorities.
Said that, I would like to stress that I do not stop anyone from taking
this approach and even I would be happy to help make Forms more
REST-like. What I wouldn't like to see is a Forms client app that we are
going to support. Haunting for IE bugs is not fun for me and I think we
could hardly find folks that I are enthusiastic about it either.
Maybe I'm just ignorant but... is there any multi threading capability
on browser side? Is it only me experiencing Firefox freezing while dojo
toolkit is being loaded?
No, JavaScript is not multi-threaded, and although there are discussions
IIRC to introduce it in JavaScript 2.0, we won't be able to rely on it
on our browsers for many years.
I'm really sad and even more doubtful hearing that :/
Although JavaScript as a language doesn't contain multi threading DOM
objects like XMLHttpRequest obviously executes JS code in multiple
threads, so I'm not certain that it is such a big problem if the
language lacks such constructions.
/Daniel
