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Ask TSS.NET: Will Ajax Make Smart Clients Unnecessary?

Posted by: Paul Ballard on March 17, 2005 DIGG
Ajax is a combination of several technologies that promises to make browser based applications more interactive. But will it be enough to counter the claim that Windows based Smart Clients provide the best possible interface and user experience in an Internet world? We want to know what you think?

Ajax is the combination of several technologies including
  • standards-based presentation using XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
  • dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model
  • data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT
  • asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest
  • and JavaScript binding everything together
Google is championing Ajax with its implementation of Google Maps as well as Google Suggest. But Microsoft is pushing .NET powered Smart Clients as the best interface for Internet deployed applications.

What do you think? How does Ajax compare to Smart Client features? Is platform independence enough to validate the use of Ajax? Should Microsoft make the same technologies available as part of ASP.NET? Tell us what you think!

Threaded replies

·  Ask TSS.NET: Will Ajax Make Smart Clients Unnecessary? by Paul Ballard on Thu Mar 17 13:57:44 EST 2005
  ·  holy smoke by David Li on Thu Mar 17 14:21:47 EST 2005
  ·  XMLHttp by Mike Griffin on Thu Mar 17 14:59:48 EST 2005
    ·  This works in firefox as well by David Li on Thu Mar 17 15:01:06 EST 2005
    ·  XMLHttp by Mike Griffin on Thu Mar 17 15:01:33 EST 2005
      ·  wht typoos by peter lin on Thu Mar 17 15:14:08 EST 2005
    ·  XMLHttp by Lee Miller on Thu Mar 17 18:38:19 EST 2005
  ·  Google Suggest and dbCombo by Mike Griffin on Thu Mar 17 15:18:50 EST 2005
    ·  XMLhttp enabled web components by Paul Czywczynski on Fri Mar 18 11:23:23 EST 2005
      ·  Intersoft Solutions by Mike Griffin on Fri Mar 18 11:32:09 EST 2005
  ·  Re: Will Ajax Make Smart Clients Unnecessary? by D D on Thu Mar 17 15:58:19 EST 2005
    ·  Smart Browser/Rich Internet Application Framework Wanted by Gerke Geurts on Thu Mar 17 17:18:24 EST 2005
      ·  framework by paul knepper on Thu Mar 17 18:40:19 EST 2005
        ·  framework by Lee Miller on Thu Mar 17 18:51:12 EST 2005
          ·  Isomorphic by Mike Griffin on Thu Mar 17 21:50:13 EST 2005
      ·  Smart Browser/Rich Internet Application Framework Wanted by Lee Miller on Thu Mar 17 18:44:22 EST 2005
        ·  Smart Browser/Rich Internet Application Framework Wanted by Richard Steere on Fri Apr 01 12:18:08 EST 2005
    ·  open standards trump technical features by Steve Shaw on Mon Oct 17 18:14:54 EDT 2005
  ·  RE:Ask TSS.NET: Will Ajax Make Smart Clients Unnecessary? by Mike Friesen on Thu Mar 17 18:50:11 EST 2005
    ·  where is the server? by Rolf Tollerud on Thu Mar 17 19:41:58 EST 2005
  ·  Ask TSS.NET: Will Ajax Make Smart Clients Unnecessary? by mename meddad on Thu Mar 17 19:46:31 EST 2005
  ·  Ask TSS.NET: Will Ajax Make Smart Clients Unnecessary? by sun yu on Fri Mar 18 02:46:44 EST 2005
  ·  Ask TSS.NET: Will Ajax Make Smart Clients Unnecessary? by Fran?ois Lemaire on Fri Mar 18 05:22:18 EST 2005
    ·  Ask TSS.NET: Will Ajax Make Smart Clients Unnecessary? by sun yu on Fri Mar 18 07:57:01 EST 2005
      ·  Ask TSS.NET: Will Ajax Make Smart Clients Unnecessary? by James MacGregor on Fri Mar 18 08:54:11 EST 2005
        ·  Ajax clients are also smart clients by Rolf Tollerud on Fri Mar 18 09:44:07 EST 2005
          ·  Ajax clients are also smart clients by Christopher Shain on Fri Mar 18 10:26:20 EST 2005
            ·  Not. by Jeff Berkowitz on Tue Mar 22 14:55:43 EST 2005
              ·  Not not. by Alex Gadea on Tue Mar 22 15:41:14 EST 2005
        ·  Yes, ASP.NET 2.0 has this by Bertrand Le Roy on Fri Mar 18 21:04:44 EST 2005
  ·  Ask TSS.NET: Will Ajax Make Smart Clients Unnecessary? by Andrew Heimdahl on Fri Mar 18 09:28:54 EST 2005
  ·  What about caching and serious offline work? by Jeff Berkowitz on Tue Mar 22 14:54:19 EST 2005
  ·  Commercial AJAX Software by Mike Parsons on Tue Mar 22 16:10:49 EST 2005
  ·  Ask TSS.NET: Will Ajax Make Smart Clients Unnecessary? by Eduardo Miranda on Wed Mar 23 05:55:42 EST 2005
    ·  Ask TSS.NET: Will Ajax Make Smart Clients Unnecessary? by Levi Rosol on Wed Mar 23 16:37:39 EST 2005
  ·  (Java) Script vs. C# + CLI by Troy Taft on Thu Mar 24 13:06:08 EST 2005
  ·  A well-proven path by Pavils Jurjans on Thu Mar 31 07:54:11 EST 2005
  Message #162192 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

holy smoke

Posted by: David Li on March 17, 2005 in response to Message #162191
I didn't know ajax could do that. I don't need life anymore :p

  Message #162197 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

XMLHttp

Posted by: Mike Griffin on March 17, 2005 in response to Message #162191
We did something similiar, using XMLHttp to make asyncronus requests allowing users to enter day in a high speed (10 key data entry) fashion into a spreadsheet. When the users tabbed to the next row the previous row was committed to the database asyncronously. The users literally never have to hit save. This was done in an ASP.NET application. If you saw it it would suprise you, it feels like Excel but over the web. I haven't heard of Ajax until now but I'm not so hot on smart clients, Ajax sounds promising. However, the XMLHttp COM object is an IE only thing though.

  Message #162198 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

This works in firefox as well

Posted by: David Li on March 17, 2005 in response to Message #162197
I tried this google suggest in firefox and in IE, they both work. :O

  Message #162199 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

XMLHttp

Posted by: Mike Griffin on March 17, 2005 in response to Message #162197
Ugg, I have a suggestion, let us edit our own posts so we can fix our typo's, most forums support this feature (I know this technically isn't a forum)

  Message #162201 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

wht typoos

Posted by: peter lin on March 17, 2005 in response to Message #162199
those tings dont xist. god knows I never ever make typs.

on a less silly note. allowing editing would be nice.

peter

  Message #162202 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

Google Suggest and dbCombo

Posted by: Mike Griffin on March 17, 2005 in response to Message #162191
I went and checked out the Google Suggest, pretty cool. We also did the same thing our application however we used DbCombo @ http://www.dbcombo.net/

It too does the XMLhttp request behind the scenes, the cool thing about DbCombo is we could put 15 comboboxes on a web page that each (virtually) contained a million rows in them and the screen popped up instantly. I highly recommend DbCombo and I have no financial stake in it whatsoever.

  Message #162203 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

Re: Will Ajax Make Smart Clients Unnecessary?

Posted by: D D on March 17, 2005 in response to Message #162191
Using smart clients isn't very smart. It doesn't compare to Java or Flash. I want something that works in any browser and potentially on any platform, not just IE on Windows. If they could at least develop a plugin for other browsers to run .NET apps, like the java plugin, or else at minimum create an alternative to java web start that also could be started from any browser.

That said, AJAX feels like a hodge-podge of techniques. We could use a more integrated web development framework.

  Message #162220 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

Smart Browser/Rich Internet Application Framework Wanted

Posted by: Gerke Geurts on March 17, 2005 in response to Message #162203
I agree, browser technology provides a good enough foundation nowadays, but we need browser-side frameworks and development tools to get development productivity that can compete with the productivity in rich clients (and ASP.NET) development.

  Message #162234 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

XMLHttp

Posted by: Lee Miller on March 17, 2005 in response to Message #162197
Nope. Firefox, Safari and Opera all support the XMLHTTPRequest object. It's not the exact same object as the IE COM based one, but its functionality & purpose are pretty much the same.

  Message #162235 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

framework

Posted by: paul knepper on March 17, 2005 in response to Message #162220
I have always wanted to use the Isomorphic product but I could never get my employers to spend the money for it. It looks really promising for a rich gui thin client framework.

http://www.isomorphic.com/technology/testdrive.jsp

  Message #162237 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

Smart Browser/Rich Internet Application Framework Wanted

Posted by: Lee Miller on March 17, 2005 in response to Message #162220
Agreed. I think the first vendor to put out a well designed toolkit and integrated IDE, that fully exploits AJAX and makes designing UI apps as easy as VS.NET, is going to make a lot of money.

Maybe this will be the next 'revolution' in frameworks? If you thought the Java guys went nuts with server-side based webapp frameworks, just imagine what all the AJAX-based frameworks will be like..

  Message #162238 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

RE:Ask TSS.NET: Will Ajax Make Smart Clients Unnecessary?

Posted by: Mike Friesen on March 17, 2005 in response to Message #162191
Am I missing something? Will Ajax work in a disconnected environment? I thought that was the "Smart" part of Smart Client was suppose to be about, able to cope with not having a consistent network connection.

  Message #162239 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

framework

Posted by: Lee Miller on March 17, 2005 in response to Message #162235
Wow, I checked out the few demos Isomorphic has.. They are pretty impressive. Check out the Outlook/Email Client demo they have. Works in IE & Firefox, and they even got drag&drop to work!<BR><BR>I think the only thing that is still missing from AJAX is the ability to do context sensitive right-click menus.

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where is the server?

Posted by: Rolf Tollerud on March 17, 2005 in response to Message #162238
Even if Google Suggest and Google Maps are pretty impressive the concept does not hold for large complicated business/enterprise application where the Javascripts can be 30.000 LOC or more - the download time exceed the patience of the users and the maintenance exceed the patience of the developers.

On the other hand there are no good alternatives at the moment. The problem will not be solved until Avalon/Xaml is installed everywhere combined with Click-Once applications that transparently upgrade themselves silently.

You may even not need any server at all!
Microsoft has bought Groove, a company that maintains a virtual Office across Internet by replication. No central database. No central anything!
http://www.groove.net/PressRelease.cfm?pagename=Press_Mar102005

Regards
Rolf Tollerud

  Message #162249 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

Ask TSS.NET: Will Ajax Make Smart Clients Unnecessary?

Posted by: mename meddad on March 17, 2005 in response to Message #162191
What about the ability to work in a disconnected fashion, optimising local processing power and take advantage of client hardware.

Smart client makes lot of sense when you need those. Not just how fast your user can enter and interact.

  Message #162253 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

Isomorphic

Posted by: Mike Griffin on March 17, 2005 in response to Message #162239
The Isomorphic demo's are very impressive. There is a revolution coming, it's a ways off yet though. But 7 to 10 years from now the web is going to be and endless jungle of applications and we will be spending most of our income subscribing to all of these online applications. I wont even touch on the theological issues involved ...

  Message #162262 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

Ask TSS.NET: Will Ajax Make Smart Clients Unnecessary?

Posted by: sun yu on March 18, 2005 in response to Message #162191
I tried the same idea like Ajax in several projects combining JavaScript, DHTML/DOM, XMLHTTP/HTTPRequest, Server-side-services to build rich clients.

It's doable and beneficial. You can improve interactive user experience, reduce network round-trips, make your server-side application truely stateless (thus scalable), and furthmore you are enabled to apply a very SIMPLE (thus beautiful) architecture which seperate UI and Business logics clearly.

But there're also severe problems: various browsers have to be supported, limited client capabilities due to browser security concerns, few client-side UI components are ready to ease the development, more importantly, browsers are not application deployment platforms after all, for example IE can not perform garbage-collection gracefully.

What will the best solution be ahead? Flash-based framework (like Laszlo which suffers poor performance as well)? Or would all browsers be thoroughly reformed to act as true rich client platforms and support ONE UI markup language (like XUI or XAML)? If so, browsers would hardly be called "browser"s any more.

I hope it would be browser neutral, Java-.NET neutral and Windows-Linux neutral at least. It's surely not easy.

  Message #162275 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

Ask TSS.NET: Will Ajax Make Smart Clients Unnecessary?

Posted by: Fran?ois Lemaire on March 18, 2005 in response to Message #162191
Hmmmm... I'm not sold. All right, isomorphic demos are impressive, but the user experience is not quite the one of a so-called "smart client" like Outlook. Remember, the most important thing in GUI is the perceived performance or latency, not the real one. With the isomorphic demos I've seen, I feel the latency. Maybe it's as quick a Outlook, I didn't do any benchmark, but it doesn't feel like it. And that's the demo :)

Technically, I'm really not sure whether you can make a seemingly responsive UI without good support for multithreading, and as long as I know, there is no such support in Javascript embedded in a web browser. Maybe there will be in some not so distant future...

By the way, I like the idea Rolf talked about : smart clients without a server working in a peer-to-peer network with replication. Smart client or Ajax, I think we'll have a great time working on network enabled apps in the next 20 years !

  Message #162296 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

Ask TSS.NET: Will Ajax Make Smart Clients Unnecessary?

Posted by: sun yu on March 18, 2005 in response to Message #162275
Timers and frames can be leveraged to meet most multithreading demands. XMLHTTP can work in asynchronous mode as well.

  Message #162303 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

Ask TSS.NET: Will Ajax Make Smart Clients Unnecessary?

Posted by: James MacGregor on March 18, 2005 in response to Message #162296
ASP.Net 2.0 supports something called out of band calls, which is basically a way of wiring up the client side control events to serverside code behind. Not too sure of the details, but believe it utilises XMLHTTP.


Should allow you to develop the Google like apps relatively easily. Still need to write a bit of Javascript, but relatively simple.

  Message #162311 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

Ask TSS.NET: Will Ajax Make Smart Clients Unnecessary?

Posted by: Andrew Heimdahl on March 18, 2005 in response to Message #162191
The W3C's XForms appears to require Ajax type behavior. This is good.

  Message #162314 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

Ajax clients are also smart clients

Posted by: Rolf Tollerud on March 18, 2005 in response to Message #162303
The most important issue is not about Ajax, out of band calls, Avalon/XAML or whatever. The sad thing to lament is the sorry state of affairs with the client in enterprise/business today. Show source on any client app and you will not see a single app that outputs clean XHTML 1.0 Strict with all presentational aspects in CSS. The worst cases (=most horrible UI) comes with Big Elephant J2EE tools which server side programmers hardly know anything about client side aspects. Yet XMLHttp has existed for several years but has been frowned upon until now, when Google has showed the way.

This is strange as there is not an easier sell to a customer than when you can show a superior client that makes him do his work 3-4 times faster. Time is money! I also will remind all in this forum that it was with superior clients that we - the Microsoft hackers! – that pushed the big mainframe computers out of the light.

So the sum of it is that we shall not repeat the mistakes of the Java world - .NET is much better suited to advance client development and we should leverage that advantage. The server side is already provided for us, Indigo will rule in the SOA world!

Attack!
Rolf Tollerud

  Message #162328 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

Ajax clients are also smart clients

Posted by: Christopher Shain on March 18, 2005 in response to Message #162314
I usually stay out of these religious discussions, but I have to throw in my 2 cents here. There are huge advantages to having your application work in a browser- you can deploy and upgrade more easily, you can run your application on any platform, and you can actually provide a RICHER user interface in a lot of ways.

Wait a sec- did he just say a web UI can be richer than a windows UI?

Yep.

No, I'm not crazy. Windows applications provide us with a wealth of rich-ui functionality, but in my experience it is not used. Windows applications, particularly in-house apps, are almost always plain-jane grey windows with a mishmash of user controls.

The really good-looking windows apps (you know, the ones users actually like) are done using HTML user interfaces, complete with big bright graphics. The people who design browsers spend oodles and oodles of time developing really smart layout code. HTML and web design have taught a huge number of developers how to leverage that and develop very good-looking web apps. And despite what we technical types might believe, looks matter. I guarantee you that if you sit a user down in front of a half-done application that takes 50% longer to get anything done, but looks awesome doing it, they will prefer that app to a really speedy but boring windows UI.

Look at Outlook, for a great example. When you open Outlook for the very first time, what do you see? Outlook Today. Guess what? Thats HTML right there. When you open that spam from 'your bank', requesting your account and social security numbers, it brings up very convincing graphics and layout to make you really believe citibank sent you this email. Thats HTML too.

Now dont get me wrong- ALL of this can be done using windows forms. The flexibility is certainly there, and with enough time, effort, and design work, it can look just as good as (if not better than) HTML. Applications like Norton Antivirus are beautiful examples of what windows apps can be. But as always the real world is very different than the theoretical. Business applications are boring. We dont have the time or money to devote to making a windows app color-coordinated. On the web, that happens almost automatically. With technologies like AJAX, we have the ability to get rid of some of the last lingering annoyances of web apps, most notably the refresh time when posting data back to the server and rendering a response. So which is the richer client now?

  Message #162344 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

XMLhttp enabled web components

Posted by: Paul Czywczynski on March 18, 2005 in response to Message #162202
I just wanted to chime in with a company's products I have been using for almost two years. Intersoft Solutions (http://www.intersoftpt.com/) has a multi column DropDown list/Combobox and a web grid control that use their "On the fly" postbacks (i.e. XMLhttp callbacks). I ended up using their WebCombo.NET control first because of licensing issues with dbCombo. They then introduced their WebGrid.NET control and I have never looked at either a combobox or grid control again. Very feature complete.

  Message #162347 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

Intersoft Solutions

Posted by: Mike Griffin on March 18, 2005 in response to Message #162344
Intersoft Solutions products look great. I tried their online demos. There really are some terrific products out there. If only software companies weren't such tight-wads we could create some killer products. Instead we create boring, stupid websites in most cases because we can't afford a few hundred bucks (even though the sales guys blow that on lunch everyday).

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Yes, ASP.NET 2.0 has this

Posted by: Bertrand Le Roy on March 18, 2005 in response to Message #162303
It uses XmlHttp and is compatible with IE, Gecko browsers (Firefox, etc.) for the moment.
It makes it a lot easier to develop web applications that do out of band calls to the server by doing all the plumbing work for you. In the end, you write server events as usual, plus the small piece of javascript that in the end will integrate the results into the page.
TreeView, GridView and DetailsView take advantage of this natively.

  Message #162835 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

What about caching and serious offline work?

Posted by: Jeff Berkowitz on March 22, 2005 in response to Message #162191
We are building a smart client that does serious data analysis. It gets data via web services but caches data in a local database on the client's box.

This approach allows serious work to be done offline. It's not limited to what you happened to look at online. This is important to our users.

I don't understand how Ajax-like technologies can provide similar functionality. Certainly they would need to have a non-browser client, because most of our users would not (and should not!) even consider running a local web server.

  Message #162837 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

Not.

Posted by: Jeff Berkowitz on March 22, 2005 in response to Message #162328
Ajax clients are not smart clients because they don't allow for significant offline work. It's not all about UI richness.

  Message #162843 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

Not not.

Posted by: Alex Gadea on March 22, 2005 in response to Message #162837
An Ajax client can be made to work offline - just not using Ajax. We are working on a product that is coming out of beta in about a month that makes heavy use of Ajax and allows off line work (although XMLHttp does not facilitate that since it is just local files that are an XML representation of a SQL dataset).

Alot of the concerns expressed can be overcome by an AJAX client - it just takes a lot of work, especially if you want to support a larger variety of browsers. Some misconceptions:

1) XMLHttp now works with IE 5.5+, Mozilla, Firefox and Opera (latest version though still buggy).

2) performance can actually be quite good and the apparant display of data is as good as a smart client. Think about a huge table you download. A ton of the page is the HTML for each cell. Using XMLHttp, one can simply pass up the TBODY tag and then when the client receives the dataset from the server, the client can build all the HTML at the client end using Javascript and DOM. The first pass can be slow as one has the overhead of building the DOM, but ultimately all that is being passed back and forth is the data without all the extra HTML that comes with a standard page refresh. This is the same data that can be passed back and forth with a smart client and a well written backend should be able to work as easily with a smart client as with an Ajax client.

3) not suitable for enterprise work because of large javascript files: actually the size of the files should not be a problem if one utilizes client caching of the javascript as well as enables GZIP at the server end. We have 200+k javascript files that after compression are received at the client end as only 20k files. On the other hand, managing a huge javascript project can be a nightmare.

4) AJAX and asynch - can be done, not a problem. Our product's screens will go out and retrieve data for up to 10 datagrids and fill the datagrids almost simultaneously.

Some real drawbacks from our experience.

1) you can only support the latest browsers.
2) trying to support multiple browsers is a royal PIA.
3) relying on Javascript for the front end can also be a royal PIA since it is not strongly typed and there are no decent debuggers - c# its not. Managing large javascript projects is NOT fun.
4) we have found that less powerful computers are happier with a smart client or a browser/flash combo than they are with IE and Ajax. IE just consumes too many CPU cycles and memory at the lower end of the computing scale. Firefox appears to be better at the lower end when deploying an Ajax client. Our recommended minimum is a client with at least 128Mb of RAM.

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Commercial AJAX Software

Posted by: Mike Parsons on March 22, 2005 in response to Message #162191
I thought I would chime in with an example a "real world" AJAX Rich Internet Client.

http://www.epicor.com/www/products/enterprise/esa

This Solution is built on AJAX technologies and DOES support offline access as well as a rich user experience.

  Message #162915 Post reply Post reply Post reply Go to top Go to top Go to top

Ask TSS.NET: Will Ajax Make Smart Clients Unnecessary?

Posted by: Eduardo Miranda on March 23, 2005 in response to Message #162191
...Javascript?
...CSS?
...Cross platform scripting?

Back to the future or just a bad dreaming? Now we'll have to come back to a scripting language. Well I keep using .net framework.

It's funny because few years ago people have made a fuzz about Java applets and now .net smart clients are bad...I just think it as an nice evolution.

Best regards.

Eduardo

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Ask TSS.NET: Will Ajax Make Smart Clients Unnecessary?

Posted by: Levi Rosol on March 23, 2005 in response to Message #162915
"...Javascript?
...CSS?
...Cross platform scripting?

Back to the future or just a bad dreaming? Now we'll have to come back to a scripting language. Well I keep using .net framework."

If i am understanding you correctly, you're saying that you feel the idea of Ajax is a step back from where .net is today.

From my experience, the Ajax methodology is a big step forward. I do agree that some sort of framework is needed to help keep things in order. But the payoffs are huge. You would still do things just as you do today from a data perspective, all in managed code, etc. what changes is how you interface with you UI. IMO, you actually get more flexibility with the control of the UI since you have the ability to use client side code to make changes.

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(Java) Script vs. C# + CLI

Posted by: Troy Taft on March 24, 2005 in response to Message #162191
Does Javascript do components? How does Javascript handle namespaces? How do you unit test Javascript? Isn't Javascripts OO constructs clumsy and difficult to implement paterns with? Isn't it difficult to unit test?

I think that the smart-space will easily accomodate both technologies, but C# and the CLI seem to be the designer's choice from my perspective. I think that Javascript allows the developer to create large piles of legacy code quickly. Later, it can be converted to C# so that it can be refactored.

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A well-proven path

Posted by: Pavils Jurjans on March 31, 2005 in response to Message #162191
I am an owner of small IT development company, and I do programming, too. About a year ago we have developed what we call WAF (Web-application framework), that utilises .NET code on the server-sice, but virtually doesn't use ASP Forms. I'm no Microsoft hater, but I have committed to write web applications with the following in mind:
1) They should use well-established standarts like HTML, CSS and JavaScript
2) The application state should be more friendly - less full page reloads, no back-button hassles, less redundant traffic between client and server.
3) On the development side - to have true MVP framework to organize all the project in logical modules.

As I found, ASP.NET wouldn't help to reach these goals, so we opeted for an ambitious project - to develop such framework by ourselves. I still love the beaty of C# programming, and we do all the server-side coding in .NET. But, that's where it stops. We have our own templates, and event processing engine. The framework treats the client (Browser) as rich platfrom what it is, doesn't have many layers of form/application abstraction because I prefer to stay in old proven DOM+JavaScript world without any smartass interfaces. The communication is done either via XMLHttp, or JavaScript-done post to a hidden frame, to enable functionality in browsers that don't have XMLHttp class, and (very important) to enable file uploads.

So, for now we have made a handful of applications in our framework, they are cross-platform, cross-browser (well, with the JavaScript and decent DOM), and with every project we have more reusable code for rich pure JavaScript client-side controls, and these controls could be as well used for any website, because they don't rely on framework presence. I must say we are quite happy. I have always been a bit worried whether our attepts are not somewhat 'too weird' or 'avoiding the beautiful ASP.NET froms features', but as I see more such things like Ajas pop up, I am more convinced that our way was right.

Finally, I'd like to say that discussion should be not about comparing Ajax-like frameworks with smart clients. It's not fair comparisaon, because noone claims web-based frameworks should work offline. The comparison should be done between the apps written in ASP.NET and say, Ajax. The true smart client is possible only when there is some player (or framework) preinstalled on the client, that would handle the caching and offline data storing.

Regards,
Pavils

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Smart Browser/Rich Internet Application Framework Wanted

Posted by: Richard Steere on April 01, 2005 in response to Message #162237
They're here now!

Why wait for Avalon to permeate corporate data centers, when these rich user capabilities are available now with Macromedia Flex- Flash Remoting; Laszlo Systems, etc. without having to cobble together a variety of other technologies. Its cross-browser, interactive, compelling and yes can be richer than most any client application. With either java or .Net application server support, these technologies will become ubiquitous before Avalaon does.

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open standards trump technical features

Posted by: Steve Shaw on October 17, 2005 in response to Message #162203
The original question misses the point. What Ajax demonstrates is that the community as a whole will eventually find ways to not be locked into a single vendor. Once a "good enough" open solution exists, it gains momentum. Google Maps, Flickr, A9, etc. are "good enough" -- in fact, they are cutting edge, without being locked into one vendor. European governments require open standards based solutions. Asian countries that are the dominant makers of the world's electronics, with intense price competition, have no love for any software solution that requires them to pay license fees. If Microsoft stays too wedded to a "lock customers in with proprietary APIs", then they will eventually lose their dominant position, just like IBM did. Personally, I find Microsoft's current development APIs and tools extremely useful - I prefer the coordinated architecture & top-to-bottom solution. But the END RESULT has to run on open standards, on all kinds of devices connected to the Internet. Period. There isn't even anything more to discuss until that point is fully absorbed by everyone, even Microsoft.

 
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