I’ve been busy with yet another big launch (YABL), so I’ve only had time to read a few things on Ajax. I’ve long argued that Ajax wasn’t just going to give us a few nice widgets, but that it would change the way we developed web applications (and how that will give you less of a headache). Apparently Christian Heilmann agrees in his juicy enchilada of a post entitled Event-Driven Web Application Design.
Rather than arguing as I do that the proper model for Ajax webapp development is the desktop GUI, he starts at a more basic level: the event-driven nature of Ajax webapps. He draws a distinction between the traditional way of doing event handling in Javascript — page finishes loading, do some initialization; click a link, trigger another function; etc. — and the DOM way of doing things — adding specific event listeners to elements.
He goes on to describe how to plan an event driven app, how to add custom events, and walks through planning an example app. While I think that he’s thinking too small (developing apps with Echo2 like a Swing app is the way to go), I think more articles like this are needed, not on how to add an Ajax widget, but rather on new ways to develop Ajax webapps.
Working on it…
http://www.frozen-o.com/blog/labels/advanced%20ajax.html