NYCPHP Meetup

[Dell Sala]

I've had a very positive experience with AJAX, and I'm starting to  
use it everywhere. It had a big impact on the maintainability of my  
code. It's pretty cool how it enforces the separation of business and  
presentation concerns. You application deploys an interface to the  
browser. Then, a lot of the functionality can be implemented as a  
private web-service which your interface communicates with. It  
becomes very easy to keep your services generic and presentation free.

One time it really saved my ass: I had an interface that needed the  
equivalent of select field for which there were over 200,000 choices.  
Obviously a plain select field wasn't going to cut it. The user  
really needed to run a search across those items first to narrow down  
the choices, then make the selection. This field was just one of  
several just like it on a single form that had plenty of other stuff  
going on too. Imagine trying to deal with all this as full post-backs  
to the server every time you needed to update the interface before  
submitting the full form. Not fun. Your code is going to be messy.  
But AJAX made that all go away.

-- Dell


On Nov 9, 2006, at 7:28 AM, Kenneth Downs wrote:

> Just curious as to who has gotten into Ajax.  Would you say you are  
> in light? Deep?  Use it for nothing? Everything?
>
> I'll toss in my answer to get us started.  Andromeda was written  
> first as a non-Ajax framework, so we had to add it in later.  We've  
> got a small library that works very well on the browser, and are  
> currently developing the server-side library of common routines.   
> We've used it for our report writer, and think it is very cool.
>
> Generally we've moved over to doing all custom screens in AJAX,  
> while the "for-free" screens that Andromeda generates are still old- 
> school.
>
> I've noticed a curious fact about using Ajax, it tends to enforce a  
> very clean structure for your HTML, and also for the corresponding  
> server-side routines.  It is one of those immediate gratification  
> things where the increased attention to structure pays off as an  
> immediate and visible improvement in the UI.
> <ken.vcf>
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