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Too Good To Be True

Posted by editor on June 27, 2006 at 6:44 AM PDT


How far should we push Ajax?

The thing about Ajax is that most tutorials are heavily slanted towards replacing existing web apps, so they add a little bit client-side functionality, but they are still heavily focused on the server and the interaction between the server and the "thin" client (a term that is getting increasingly inappropriate for browsers where Ajax is involved). So, you start with a webapp that refreshes the whole page, and then you see how to replace the refresh and instead send a little XML that the client parses and uses to alter the DOM and thus update just the parts of the page that need updating. And so far, that's been really helpful for a lot of people.

But what if you put aside the web app paradigm for a second and looked into just how far you can get on the client side? Even if it's a "just for fun" investigation, thinking not in terms of existing webapps but in terms of more powerful client-server systems might be a mental jump well worth taking.

As an exercise in this kind of thinking, Simon Morris offers a tutorial for the new Google Web Toolkit that throws out the server entirely In the Feature Article Kickstarting Google Web Toolkit on the Client Side he takes an entirely client-side view of GWT, which allows you to write Java code that is then converted into JavaScript for use by many popular browsers. Adding in client-side interactivity and animation that puts Tumbling Duke to shame, it sort of feels like when applets first hit the scene, and we wondered what we could do with them. Client-side GWT may offer some of the same capabilities, without the struggle to get a JVM on your clients' systems.

In Java Today,

Claudio Miranda asks: "How much time do you need to assemble and configure a usable java development environment with the regular tools a java developer needs to start coding ? Well, you can cut some time here, by using a Linux LiveCD with Java Tools, just boot it up and your initial java environment is ready to the first javac."

An ACM Queue article by Michi Henning looks at The Rise and Fall of CORBA. "Given that only a few years ago, CORBA was considered the cutting edge of middleware that promised to revolutionize e-commerce, it is surprising to see how quickly the technology was marginalized, and it is instructive to examine some of the deeper reasons for the decline." The article draws some lessons from CORBA's failure, and notes that the open source community has better followed these guidelines than have industry consortia.

2006-06-22: Attendees from countries including Austria, China, Finland, France, India, Japan, Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden and the USA presented thirty two position papers on 9-10 March in Tokyo at the W3C Workshop on the Ubiquitous Web. They proposed ways to standardize distributed applications that adapt to context: user preferences, device capabilities and environmental conditions. The workshop report has been published.

Ethan Nicholas talks All about intern() in today's Weblogs. "String.intern() is a widely ignored and misunderstood method which can have serious performance implications. Let's dive in and take a look."

In
An EJB 3 Glossary for Elvis, Cay Horstmann writes:
"I am working on a glossary of EJB 3 terms that gives both the official definitions and explanations that Elvis can understand. (Elvis is the programmer persona who is neither Einstein nor the point-and-click/drag-and-drop "just give me a wizard" Mort.) What other definitions would you like? Do you spot errors or inaccuracies? Please let me know."

Richard Bair offers a tutorial on combining
Swing, JAX-WS, and JavaBeans:
"JAX-WS can be a bit daunting, especially for the desktop developer. In this blog I show a simple web service, simple form, and how to use JavaBeans to tie it all together."

Richard also has a few things to say about the direction of Swing in today's Forums. In
Re: JDNC house cleaning, he writes:
"It is also very important that we reach out to development communities that have not in the past used Swing. I'm thinking of many web developers, Microsoft developers, Pascal (Delphi) developers, and so on. I want to enable people to write cool apps like Aerith with little difficulty. Aerith is far from a gimicky app. It has real monetary potential. It may not be enterprise, but it is consumer. Consumer oriented apps has always been a weak spot for us. Hopefully we can take some steps to address that."

In
Re: Compare and contrast Entities and Instances., stvconsultants writes:
"My aim for this thread is to have a debate (even if only with myself, but I'm hoping for more than just me) where people can try to tease out an understanding that allows us to explain what happens. I fully expect that as people contribute their thoughts to this thread, I will be forced to re-examine my interpretation of the specification until I come up with a consistent interpretation that makes sense all the time. OK, now back to the first two paragraphs of the spec, and my interpretation of them."

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How far should we push Ajax?

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