Does anyone have experience with more than one technology for developing a rich interface ie Web 2.0 as they say in the media? I've messed around with Google Web Toolkit and Adobe's Flex 2. By this point I've done more Flex than GWT, but at this point I think Flex is far superior based mainly on it's out of the box capabilities and relatively nice IDE. Any other opinions?

4/3/2007 11:20:44 PM

Ruby on Rails or any of its frameworks?
Yahoo UI Library?

CakePHP? http://www.gadgetopia.com/post/5832

[Edited on April 3, 2007 at 11:30 PM. Reason : .]

4/3/2007 11:24:52 PM

I think pretty much all these "toolkits" are retarded.

The same shit that was happening when Flash 3.0 hit is happening now. People are going "web 2.0" because it's the thing to do, not because it's at all warranted.

Most websites I've seen that use these libraries don't GAIN anything from them, and all the flash and pizzazz generally just makes the sites harder to use and more irritating.

4/3/2007 11:30:01 PM

^

I guess the better solution is maintaining an app with 15,000 JSPs and having tens of thousands of lines of UI state managed on the server.

I guess I should have clarified that I'm more curious about supplanting an existing enterprise application front end with one that behaves better and is easier to maintain. I'm not really concerned as much with a simple web site.



[Edited on April 3, 2007 at 11:36 PM. Reason : a]

4/3/2007 11:33:02 PM

I implemented a project a while back using some of Ruby on Rails's AJAX stuff. Much easier than straight AJAX but there was still a lot to be desired.

4/3/2007 11:39:51 PM

um, maybe it's just me, but what kind of (well designed) app is running 15,000 JSPs? And how does AJAX solve the problem?

The only three things I've yet to see AJAX be useful for are:

-pseudo-interactive web apps a-la google maps
-keeping content loading seamless when not changing context
-finally being able to make push websites

maybe I just missed the boat, but I've never seen the allure of RoR. Seems like it's just another solution to a problem that wasn't really there in the first place.

4/4/2007 12:58:33 AM

Flex 2 is what I've got the most experience with, and it works asynchronously but not with JavaScript. Essentially it solves the problem by being able to compact multiple JSP views into one part of the application using familiar UI components as well as bind things in the interface to datasources or a middle tier by executing methods in existing Java code. For instance, in our case in one part of the app there are about 13 tabs. These tabs correspond to 1 "container jsp" each which in some cases has 4-5 other JSPs nested within it. With Flex you can faily easily compact the entire thing into one Flash .SWF. Then the tabs and the state of the UI is managed on the client and the app is layed out in a more efficient way to navigate. When you click on a tab you don't have to wait for all the data to load on the next page. This can get slow with the amount of data with which we deal.

The app basically does sales, network engineering, router/switch management, and fault management (like if a router dies we can know where in like 2 minutes). Designing apps of this scale is always a problem and thats why there are so many frameworks like Spring and Struts to help address the pitfalls. When you have 10,000 users all bitching for this or that functionality and some of them are VPs and other higher ups in a Fortune 10 company there isn't much time to say, "wait the original design sucks ass lets start from scratch". Unfortunatly there haven't been many code reviews or standards mandatory and we've had several people that ride the short bus contributing to the code base. There are a couple of people that are interested in moving forward from the existing 1999 era and trying a new technology. The outcome of what you can accomplish with Flex is far greater than writing table tags over and over and the users think you worked that much harder.

Implement a small web app in RoR and if you still don't see the allure come back and explain why. You can do a whole CRUD interface with a database in about 20 lines of code. Not to mention blocks sent as arguments is pretty cool to do

4/4/2007 8:14:26 AM

^I mean, this sounds like any mid level enterprise application to me. Why you would want to wrap everything into a flash file counfounds me even more. So far, all this wrapping and containers and client-siding of the UI are things that have been done in other ways for quite a long time.

I can see how it helps your software, but it seems to me (and this is definitely a pretty uninformed opinion) that based on the data you are moving that implementing this in a web browser isn't exactly the best solution. Granted it's probably one of those "if we could start over we would do it X way" type of things, but that's kind of what I was talking about in my first post.

As for RoR, been there, done that. And yes it's SUPER easy to do the things it's tailored to do. But when you want to organize something differently, or god forbid present the user a task in a different order or presentation, I've found RoR to be a complete sob to use. It could definitely be because I'm so used to PHP and I don't do much programming anymore, or that I'm just getting set in my ways about interface design, but I'm not the biggest fan of any system or API that guides you down a single path to completion, however fast it is.

4/4/2007 9:04:53 AM

Well it works currently and for deployment purposes on releases it's a much better solution than making sure the app is installed correctly in tens of thousands of locations. All we have to do is make sure users have an up to date browser.

What are these other ways you speak of? That's what I'm particularly curious about.

4/4/2007 10:35:09 AM

CakePHP

4/4/2007 11:14:33 AM

Hey look it's PHP on Rails

Another problem with it is that you lose your existing expertise in Java

Quote :

"^I mean, this sounds like any mid level enterprise application to me. Why you would want to wrap everything into a flash file counfounds me even more."

Because it's designed from the ground up as a UI framework?

[Edited on April 4, 2007 at 11:54 AM. Reason : a]

4/4/2007 11:41:16 AM

http://www.phpontrax.com/

4/4/2007 11:59:37 AM

^^Yea, but PHP on rails at least makes sense, as it's one possible use case for a much larger API.

Thanks for finding that Chance, i'll have to check it out

4/4/2007 12:15:11 PM

there are plenty of PHP frameworks
http://www.phpit.net/article/ten-different-php-frameworks/
http://www.phpwact.org/php/mvc_frameworks

4/4/2007 12:21:06 PM

Quote :

"Thanks for finding that Chance, i'll have to check it out"

I have RSS feeds set on a lot of shit I don't need or should even have a care about, web programming being one of them...you know, in case one day I decide to actually mess with it again (never happen). I learned about this via Gadgetopia

http://www.gadgetopia.com/post/5832

I try to keep up with technologies, just so that I am aware of them, that, and agentlion always swings by to chat about them when he learns about the newest fangled stuff.

4/4/2007 12:30:13 PM

Quote :

"agentlion always swings by to chat about them when he learns about the newest fangled stuff."

yeah, or i just post the exact same link yesterday, 4 minutes after the initial question was asked!

4/4/2007 12:46:38 PM

hahahahahaha

doh, I completely whiffed that

[Edited on April 4, 2007 at 1:07 PM. Reason : .]

4/4/2007 1:07:06 PM

But all of this stuff is largely the same. You still have to write foreach loops that out put some form of HTML and then style it with style sheets and none of that is new. The only thing new is code generation, but for most apps you still do a lot of rewriting.

Why not just use JBoss Seam for code generation that way you can hook into your existing Java middle ware and have access to all Java components?

4/4/2007 1:20:15 PM

^because java isnt the end-all-be-all.

And you don't have to resort to constantly rewriting loop code if you have a well designed application. Take a look sometime at any of 100 or so of the top PHP apps out there today, they are very tightly coded and amazingly flexible.

4/4/2007 2:21:09 PM

Quote :

"yeah, or i just post the exact same link yesterday, 4 minutes after the initial question was asked!"

Man, I try hard to ignore you in real life, it works much better on tdub I guess.

Actually, I am pretty sure I must have read your post before you edited it, because I definitely remember reading it, and I definitely DON'T remember you putting CakePHP in there.

Considering your original came at 11:24, and Noen posted at 11:30, the same time your edit came out, he probably didn't re-read your post either.

4/4/2007 2:30:07 PM

^^

Well in special cases it can be... Like having 10,000 classes already containing all your business logic Not to mention a lot of esoteric libraries that are written in Java but not anything else because Java is so prolific.

Where are these magical PHP apps?

[Edited on April 4, 2007 at 2:37 PM. Reason : ?]

4/4/2007 2:36:48 PM

Look real competing technologies to Flex to develop RIA

M$ Windows Presentation Foundation
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/06/01/windowspresentationfoundation/default.aspx#S1

Open Laszlo
http://www.openlaszlo.org/

4/6/2007 4:55:38 PM