Eugene Lazutkin wrote: > My only problem with RoR's approach in general regardless of underlying > library is it is very low level. Essentially it is a way to propagate > some events to the server. I am not sure I like the idea of callbacks > for every sneeze. David (of RoR) really dislikes programming client > side, so he moved everything he could server-side. Do we really want to > replicate RoR? I prefer to see more widget-oriented approach.
I think its actually rather high level, in that you don't really need to know any Javascript what-so-ever. Obviously not knowing any Javascript will be a limitation to exactly what you can do, but the helpers and RJS meet a lot of people's needs with a very minimal amount of additional learning required to utilize it. The stuff done with it also is mainly geared towards stuff that requires server participation to an extent. If you know Javascript well, you can reduce the traffic in the AJAX request, but you still need some data. Take as example, a button that when clicked, adds something to your shopping cart, swaps in the cart element HTML, and fades it in or something snazzy. You will need to do an AJAX request to attempt to add it, and receive acknowledgment. If you know Javascript, you could just keep everything client-side, and toggle behavior based on a very simple Success/Failed response on the cart add. If you don't know Javascript, but use Rails style helpers, you'd instead just update the cart element with the reply from the server, etc. So you send slightly more data over the line, but very little knowledge of Javascript is needed. However, if you're building a "real" interactive AJAX application, you will no doubt need to know Javascript. The RoR helpers won't help you as they hit a very specific range of use-cases common in many webapps. > While it reminds me of extending command line utility with GUI dialog > boxes in some places, it works. We have to support this style of Ajax. > But it would be better if we offer something more original and more useful. I agree entirely, though usually once you get too far past the basic cases the RoR helpers account for the "genericness" starts to break down. The common problem with widgets is that you'll spend as much time customizing them for your need, as you would writing one that solves your need from scratch. If the widget itself can be broken down into the generic portions, then you'd be able to quickly build custom widgets that do exactly what you want. That'd be ideal I think, though I'm not sure what these generic portions would look like... - Ben
