Re: [OSCOM] Ajax and CMS

Paul Everitt wrote:

> First, do any of you plan to add Ajax capabilities in your CMS  products 
> during the next product cycle?

yep, we (lenya) used guido's xmlhttp tree script for better performance

other things (drag & drop etc) would be nice 'bud vase features' [1], 
but the implemetation effort makes it not worth it unless someone is a 
UI geek.

> Second, I think the Rails approach seems to center on having the  server 
> provide an abstraction layer so that the JavaScript stuff is  
> auto-generated and injected into the page.  Presumably the idea is  that 
> web application developers should be shielded from browser  technologies.

the intersection of backend and frontend skill sets is probably rather 
small..

> Thus a second question: how many of you view the browser side (JS,  CSS, 
> etc.) as fundamental skills for development in your project?   Are most 
> of you (the ones creating CMS products) skilled at these  technologies?

i view these as fundamental and groan every time i have to implement yet 
another one-off widget. between css standardization efforts [2] and 
better seperation of behaviour, markup and style (something that most 
sites are very bad at today), there will hopefully emerge a nice set of 
reusable building blocks.

then again, this has been possible for years, with little to show for 
it. maybe the recent surge in interest will change things?

[1] http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/bud_vase_features.php
[2] http://www.oscom.org/wiki/cssnamingconventions/

(yes i know about the 403 on that link.. damn wiki spammers)