NYCPHP Meetup

[Jon Baer]

Personally ... I think even broader ideas like Dojo Offline (http:// 
dojotoolkit.org/offline) and Google Gears (http://gears.google.com/)  
takes it to an even further level which has not been tapped (yet).   
Now if only you can sneak it into a project ;-)

- Jon

On Sep 4, 2007, at 8:50 AM, Kenneth Downs wrote:

> One thing that seems to have gone unsaid in the praise for Ajax is  
> its ability to radically transform how we maintain state.
>
> The web server session is our basic mechanism for storing  
> information between requests.  But it gets clumsier and clumsier to  
> try to maintain complex state across many page requests when you  
> use a session.  Ingenious minds have put their will to the problem  
> and come up with workable systems, but all of them are complicated  
> because of the nature of the problem.
>
> That problem, stated here, is simply the problem of tracking what  
> I'll call the "context" of a user's session.  Some elements of a  
> session are fixed: the user id, the password, a few other things,  
> but almost everything that we need to track is always changing.  A  
> basic example: a list of search results.  Where do you store it?   
> When the user hits, "NEXT PAGE", how do you know what to do?  If  
> you are using a session, what happens if he opens a new window and  
> has two search results sets up for two different tables?
>
> Ajax solves this problem neatly by letting you move all state [1]  
> into the browser.  This makes sense from an architectural viewpoint  
> because we are putting this context information close to where it  
> is needed, the UI.
> I've been converting the basic Andromeda UI code over to a  
> completely AJAX system [1], and have found my code radically  
> simplified and far smoother, due almost entirely to the moving of  
> all state information to the browser.  Hurray for Ajax!
>
> [1] Here I'll use "state" to mean the changing context of user  
> requests, and assume we are still using the session for User_id and  
> password.
>
> [2] Andromeda is used to make database applications for businesses,  
> we don't care in this case about google following our links.
>
>
> -- 
> Kenneth Downs
> Secure Data Software, Inc.
> www.secdat.com    www.andromeda-project.org
> 631-689-7200   Fax: 631-689-0527
> cell: 631-379-0010
>
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