Wow. Impressive dhtml painting application. This AJAX stuff is getting really sophisticated. Well, okay, that isn't actually sophisticated at all compared to a stand alone program like Illustrator, but because this wasn't possible to do on the web a short time ago (without using Flash that is, or a java applet,) it's pretty cool. Notice your drawing is being recorded on the right, and you can press play at any time and it will recreate your drawing over time.
Personally I'm not very interested in making drawing applications, and I don't want to use these techniques at all for creating publicly facing web pages (mostly because I like to always think about supporting small wireless devices where this stuff isn't going to work well.) But for administrative, and other behind the scenes pages, AJAX allows for some serious improvements.
I'm going to work with the dojo toolkit. Here's the general wikipedia page for Ajax:Ajax, shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a Web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, and usability.
do you plan on doing animations?
No, it's not so much the graphics angle. I just linked to that one because it's impressive in the sense that you might not think it was possible to do with just javascript and html. But I'm going to use those same tricks - sort of the way google does with gmail - to make the administrative interfaces to my web app behave more like a stand alone desktop app.
The key is that you can send info from the browser back to the server, and then return new data to the browser which displays it - without ever reloading the page. That's the breakthrough. (And actually, these techniques have been around for a while, but they are just getting to a fully mature point where it's not crazy to deploy them in the right situation.)
Sort of hard to explain.
Many of the fancy-pants web techniques drive me nuts, e.g. gratuitous flash. But well-designed interactivity is very cool.
I agree Mark, and that's why I have stayed away from the fancy pants. But now I am changing my mind, but only for a specific subset of pages. For instance, around here I wouldn't put any Ajax (or god forbid Flash) on a regular public blog page. But I would like to Ajax-ify things like [editpage] (the behind the scenes control page where you can change various aspects of the page layout with a point and click interface.) I think that would do very well with a tabbed layout (a la google mail) so I could organize some of the controls into different groups, and options that don't make sense would just magically not show up (like if you don't have comments enabled, why should [editpage] show you a bunch of options for comments?)
In general I think this sort of technology (which is really just good old DHTML and javascript) is acceptable on behind the scenes control / interface pages. You give up some access flexibility (may not work correctly on a cellphone, for example) but for control pages that only the page owner is going to see - and probably not need to tweak from a cellphone or other mobile device - I think the UI design win outweighs the compatibility issues.
But I still wouldn't build pages that are supposed to be viewed by the general public with technology like this, so I agree with you. I'm a big fan of straightforward design and simple HTML.
I've seen some pages that may be ajax-based that have an composition window and a WYSIWYG window. I find that very helpful.
|
Personally I'm not very interested in making drawing applications, and I don't want to use these techniques at all for creating publicly facing web pages (mostly because I like to always think about supporting small wireless devices where this stuff isn't going to work well.) But for administrative, and other behind the scenes pages, AJAX allows for some serious improvements.
I'm going to work with the dojo toolkit. Here's the general wikipedia page for Ajax:
- jim 6-20-2006 10:00 pm
do you plan on doing animations?
- steve 6-21-2006 5:58 pm
No, it's not so much the graphics angle. I just linked to that one because it's impressive in the sense that you might not think it was possible to do with just javascript and html. But I'm going to use those same tricks - sort of the way google does with gmail - to make the administrative interfaces to my web app behave more like a stand alone desktop app.
The key is that you can send info from the browser back to the server, and then return new data to the browser which displays it - without ever reloading the page. That's the breakthrough. (And actually, these techniques have been around for a while, but they are just getting to a fully mature point where it's not crazy to deploy them in the right situation.)
Sort of hard to explain.
- jim 6-21-2006 6:26 pm
Many of the fancy-pants web techniques drive me nuts, e.g. gratuitous flash. But well-designed interactivity is very cool.
- mark 6-21-2006 7:50 pm
I agree Mark, and that's why I have stayed away from the fancy pants. But now I am changing my mind, but only for a specific subset of pages. For instance, around here I wouldn't put any Ajax (or god forbid Flash) on a regular public blog page. But I would like to Ajax-ify things like [editpage] (the behind the scenes control page where you can change various aspects of the page layout with a point and click interface.) I think that would do very well with a tabbed layout (a la google mail) so I could organize some of the controls into different groups, and options that don't make sense would just magically not show up (like if you don't have comments enabled, why should [editpage] show you a bunch of options for comments?)
In general I think this sort of technology (which is really just good old DHTML and javascript) is acceptable on behind the scenes control / interface pages. You give up some access flexibility (may not work correctly on a cellphone, for example) but for control pages that only the page owner is going to see - and probably not need to tweak from a cellphone or other mobile device - I think the UI design win outweighs the compatibility issues.
But I still wouldn't build pages that are supposed to be viewed by the general public with technology like this, so I agree with you. I'm a big fan of straightforward design and simple HTML.
- jim 6-21-2006 9:03 pm
I've seen some pages that may be ajax-based that have an composition window and a WYSIWYG window. I find that very helpful.
- mark 6-22-2006 8:55 pm