I think the approaches of the blueprint components are highly faulty-- especially with the use of dojo.bind. You are dealing with pure URI negotiation which is orthogonal to the communication capabilities of JSF. Example, the autocomplete example uses Shale Remoting via an EL _expression_-- but doesn't carry context, so yeah, you can put #{ foo.suggest} but only if 'foo' is globally available which is a huge gotcha for developers and pushing the JSF solution back to where we were with JSP 2.0 and JSF 1.1 issues again with the disconnect.
Jacob,
It might surprise you to hear *me* say something like this, but the entire AJAX world does *not* revolve around JSF :-0.
Don't get me wrong. The use cases for wanting to partially update the state of the JSF component tree are perfectly valid -- and the stuff you guys are looking at with Avatar is perfectly reasonable (can you *please* settle it down so I can use it in Shale Remoting, for JSF 1.1 as well as JSF 1.2, in addition to what's already there :-). But this is by no means an approach that is universally applicable.
Take the use case you are complaining about here (the auto complete component having to forward the method binding _expression_ to call the end user's method). Yes, that is necessary because this particular implementation does not assume that it has access to the JSF component tree (from which it could acquire the appropriate _expression_). And, it would be perfectly reasonable to want an auto complete component that *allowed* me to do such a thing.
But to *require* me to do that? Nah ... there are valid tradeoffs between sending extra state information (and avoiding the computational effort required to restore the component tree) and not doing so. That's not for the component author to predict -- an ideal auto complete text field component would support *both* strategies.
To say nothing of a Java back-end for non-JSF based applications, which care not a whit about JSF component state :-). Don't forget that this world exists too, and Shale Remoting as it currently exists supports out of the box.
Craig
