Re: [OSCOM] Ajax and CMS

On 2.5.2005 10:42 Uhr, Paul Everitt wrote:
> 
> Howdy all.  This is primarily an email to the developers of the  various
> OSCOM CMS projects, but if others have a strong opinion,  chime in.
> 
> Most of us have read about Ajax:
> 
>   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX
> 
> First, do any of you plan to add Ajax capabilities in your CMS  products
> during the next product cycle?

We use LiveSearch
(http://blog.bitflux.ch/archive/2004/7/5/spotlight_like_livesearch_added.html)
not only on our blog, but also internally in the admin section.
Furthermore an XMLHTTPRequest Tree (another one than Guido's, since we
use that much longer) and of course Kupu's Image/Filedrawer (which I
would count as AJAX as well). BXE and Kupu itself may not really count
as AJAX style, but in BXE 2.0, we will have some features, which allows
more interaction with the serverside.

So yes, we plan to use more Ajax capabilities in the future, we'd also
like to enhance our Database-Record-Editor with Server Interaction.
> 
> 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.

http://www.modernmethod.com/sajax/ (different languages)
http://jpspan.sourceforge.net/wiki/doku.php (php only)

do similar stuff. I didn't look very deep into those, but AFAIK they
only abstract the calling of methods via XMLHTTPRequst to the server.
Which is the easy part (don't know about Rails). The hard part is making
all that cool, fancy JS stuff actually work on most browser and degrade
nice on older browsers.

> 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?

In BXE it's fundamental ;) For Bitflux CMS, CSS is also fundamental, but
JS isn't.

But in general I think JS/AJAX is getting more important, people will
expect having some of those features doable with AJAX. But it will also
make the product much more complex. You have to know JS, you have to
debug on different browser (not only the layout, but also the behaviour)
and it should still work on older browser. A lot of new areas, where the
knowledge isn't readily available out there. JS doesn't have the great
communities like PHP/Python/etc for easy help and vast archives. This
could change with the latest AJAX Hype, but I'm not really sure. JS is
still a toy language for a lot of skilled programmers...

chregu


> 
> --Paul
> 
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