jutopia - Rich Web Applications

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Rich Web Applications

[ tirsen ] 05:08, Friday, 21 January 2005

I'm really amazed how these "rich web clients" are popping up all over the place: GMail (anybody want an invite? ;-) ), Flickr, Tada-list, Bloglines and so forth. In some respects they are even easier to use than their desktop equivalents; Mail.app on my lovely PowerBook is really the sweetest mail client ever but... I still tend to use GMail more often. Same with iPhoto vs. Flickr. It's something about these apps that maintain the ease of use of a web interface with the responsiveness of a fat client one.

I guess it's time to really brush up on your JavaScript skills, so a couple of days ago I went down to the bookstore to pick up the book. JavaScript is really quite a lovely language, closures, dynamic typing and so forth.

Oh, and Ruby on Rails really rocks...

Don't forget Tagsurf ( tagsurf.com ) which is much newer than Flickr or del.icio.us, but which is built around the same concept of tags.

There is a trend right now for webapps which do one thing and do it simply and do it well. Simplicity is a fine thing and I think that developers are finally getting a clue. I know that I'm finally getting a clue about it and am trying to build webapps that are really easy to use, powerful and fun.

-Anthony

--Anthony Eden, January 21, 2005 05:23 AM

It's not that Javascript is a bad language, it's that the DOM models you need to use to get power are so inconsistent.

--Robert Watkins, January 21, 2005 05:55 AM

Yes, Rails is great, finished two projects, but it might be overhyped. Which new technology is not? ;-)

--Stephan Schmidt, January 26, 2005 08:58 AM

"It's not that Javascript is a bad language, it's that the DOM models you need to use to get power are so inconsistent."

I've been stewing about this for quite some time now. And as I'm about to start with ThoughtWorks, and had a look at the Selenium JS-based web app tester, I thought "Hey, whatabout a nice little Java Applet that implemented the full W3C DOM interfaces and mapped that down to whatever browser it was running on, to remove the inconsistencies. It would need 'plugin' type modules for each browser version, but it would make JS coding a hell of a lot easier".

I don't recall seeing anything, and I haven't looked to hard yet, but anyone feel like helping make a new CodeHaus project??

--Joshua Graham, May 24, 2005 06:26 AM