...more recent posts
The datamantic.com domain is six years old today. Time flies.
I've been playing around with the Ext library this week. This is the furthest I've dug into any javascript library. It is really powerful stuff. Pretty mind boggling. Ext lets you create very nice user interfaces out of javascript, and it takes care of all the heavy lifting, most notably ironing out all the cross browser wrinkles. You can see a bunch of examples and demos on this page (click in the left hand column to see dialogs, toolbars, menus, forms, etc...)
So I'm really impressed, and thinking about using this for projects in the future. But there is still something that bugs me about this new world (which I guess people would call Web 2.0, although that doesn't really have a strict definition.) I still think every atomic unit of information (every blog post, every inventory item, every single whatever-it-is you are building a website about) should have it's own page (that is, should be addressable by it's own unique URI.) That's the whole point of the web isn't it? I like all the fancy tabbed interfaces with pop up dialogs and whatnot, but if you can't even deep link to a specific item then it's all useless.
But that's not to say you can't build things the right way with Ext. Maybe it's more like Ext just gives you a lot more power with which to go wrong. So you have to be careful. To be very general, I'm thinking that a lot of these fancy UI features will be useful on control pages (i.e., administrative pages; the backend of the website, like [editpage] here) which don't need to be crawled by google or shared by users, and less useful on public facing content pages.