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[nycphp-talk] AJAX and State

tedd tedd at sperling.com
Wed Sep 5 12:50:26 EDT 2007


At 12:07 PM -0400 9/5/07, Gary Mort wrote:
>tedd wrote:
>>Another way of asking this question is, "Besides not triggering a 
>>refresh, what can ajax do that php can not?"
>>
>
>PHP cannot control the browser presentation, it can merely provide 
>static information to the browser.

Ah yes, my question was somewhat lame. I know that php can't control 
client-side. But, that's not what I was asking.

>Javascript can control the browser presentation, and it can be 
>generated by PHP
>AJAX merely allows you to combine the functionality of javascript 
>with the dynamic data access of PHP(or any other CGI script) in 
>order to put the two together in a more dynamic fashion.  It has 
>sparked some innovations in presenting and packaging data generated 
>by CGI that than make the whole thing reusable(for example, 
>frameworks which pull all the dynamic data down to the server and 
>then allow one to work offline and then sync up to the server.

Yeah, like what I've seen in jQuery -- very exciting stuff. This impressed me:

http://webbytedd.com/a/move/


>Of course, the curmudgeon in me would say "well, besides using a web 
>browser, what can this do that a Lotus Notes client can't? " :-0 and 
>the answer is it can be done without charging hundreds of dollars 
>per user.)

Next year it will be cheaper.

>I see web browser applications slowly approaching the full power of 
>a Notes Application from over 5 years ago.  But they do it in a 
>cross platform, affordable manner.  Still, with notes I knew 
>precisely what functions would work on every system with a notes 
>client plus had certain levels of security unavailable with a 
>browser without a lot of work, so it has it's place in the corporate 
>environment.

And, perhaps the year after that those problems will be solved.

My slant, which is of no importance, is that web application 
developers have to be masters of several languages -- one won't do. 
At present, a good grasp of php, javascript, mysql, css, and ajax 
makes for good company in application development.

 From the perspective of 42 years of programming, to me all languages 
are converging anyway -- I don't see that much difference now and I 
expect that one day there will be only one.

Cheers,

tedd
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