[TriLUG] OT custom tag library - ajax

rleathers rleathers at americanri.com
Tue Dec 19 11:56:46 EST 2006


Question for anyone with some ajax knowledge:

 

I think we are possibly doing things the hard way here.  It feels like
someone should have already done what we are trying to do, but if not, then
I want some advice on turning over what we've done so far so others might
benefit

 

We started building an application last September.  It is written in PHP and
uses MySQL.  To keep the user interface from being slow to render and too
crowded to use, we decided to break things into chunks and create multiple
independent "windows", each with a fairly narrow and obvious purpose.  To
get the desired results, we started writing our own tag library which we
named ARIJAX.

 

We looked at other libraries (dogo, YUI, AJForm) and found that they merely
provide the transportation layer but not the communication layer. There are
many instances of ajax requestor calls ( in fact we're using O'Reily's
HTTP.js from JavaScript: The Definitive Guide ).

 

The problem with those and others that we've looked at is that they don't
integrate the AJAX communication with the control of the DOM tree.

Additional javascript code has to be written to interpret the results of the
Ajax call for each and every communication. Arijax integrates the ajax
request and communication and is able to properly interpret the response to
render and display additional HTML attributes. 

 

One of the primary issues being faced right now is writing Javascript in a
browser neutral framework. An "outer" frame-work such as YUI may prove
helpful. In addition, a more flexible "Verb Subject Information" pairing
needs to be made instead of the "Verb+Subject Information" as it is now (ie:
how the data is sent over). 

 

Does this make sense?  

Is anyone aware of a fairly complete library that already does this?  

Is there a better way than what I've described?

 

Thanks,

 

Ryan

 

 




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