> Point well made and understood. > > Perhaps what we're looking for here can be achieved without the > wholesale adoption of an MVC framework. Perhaps the UI/widget > framework can do a lot of the visual controller stuff anyway, allowing > people to create abstract 'objects' (without full OOP) for controlling > visual elements. Obviously DOM manipulation provides us with a view > component, and people are free to create templating systems or > whatever else they like on top of that. The real area where progress > can be made, imo, is in data handling. That means, for example, being > able to define a 'model' with certain fields, tying those fields to > DOM elements, and automatically validating the input in those elements > against the rules within the model, then calling a simple function to > persist the model data to the server, or load a new model and display > that instead, etc. I think that this would be sufficiently useful > that a 'jQuery Data' plugin that aims to make this kind of task as > easy as DOM manipulation is already would be worth pursuing. Full MVC > would be one extension of this approach, but not essential to it.
If I had to guess and put percentages on the jQuery user base I would say that they break down something like this: - 95% of jQuery user's needs are perfectly met by current jQuery code/plugins (19 out of 20 users) - 4% of jQuery user's create complex interactions - would possibly benefit from a widget architecture - 1% of jQuery users have a need for both complex widgets and a means of tying them to an existing data model I'd like to propose taking two steps (mostly on my end): 1) Writing up a solid overview of how to make the best use of current jQuery technology (for extensibility, encapsulation, etc.) 2) Work on refining the widget code with the ultimate goal of having it be ready for jQuery UI 1.8 - but releasing it separately so that people can start to play around with it and see if it'll benefit their plugins/writing style. Once we tackle those two points (#1 will help those in the 95% to realize how to best use their current tools, #2 will help the demands of the other 4%) we can safely start to look at some sort of data abstraction code. My biggest concern with a data abstraction is that it usually requires some sort of specific set up on the server to benefit from it. Would everyone be able to benefit from this addition regardless of server construction? (PHP users? .NET users? ColdFusion users? Rails users? etc.) So while I will continue in this direction for now, I'd still love more feedback: Cases of where complex applications worked well in jQuery, examples where they did not. Knowing the exact set of use cases that might exist would help us to quantify the amount of work that we should put in and where. --John --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "jQuery Development" group. To post to this group, send email to jquery-dev@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to jquery-dev+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/jquery-dev?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
