Loosely Coupled

I just listened to an interview with Tim Berners-Lee , inventor of the World Wide Web. While most of the interview focused the Semantec Web , what I found most interesting, were his thoughts on Rich Internet Applications. Of course he thinks this is an exciting development, but with various technologies (Flash, JavaFX, Silverlight) competing in this space, he feels that standardization would help speed its adoption. He points to how standardizing HTML in an open and royalty-free way helped to speed the adoption of the Web. Standardizing this technology would be a great step. Right now, these technologies run as a plugin on the browser. Once standardized, browsers could build this functionality right in, making adoption seamless. Open-sourcing the technology is not enough. The biggest problem with standardization is that it takes so long. It's a good thought, hopefully it will gain some traction. ****** More news on the DB front. The more I delve into the database schema and...

On my last web application project, we realized the JSP/JSF presentation layer we implemented was not cutting it anymore. Transitions between pages were too slow, users wanted more dynamic feedback and drag and drop functionality. The project was put on indefinite hold shortly after that but I wanted to talk about some of the technologies I researched to address these problems. AJAX Ajax seems like the mainstream choice. While AJAX could help address the transition time and feedback issues, I don’t believe it could help add drag and drop. What worries me about AJAX stems from my experience with CSS. Even though CSS is a web standard, some browsers still implement CSS differently. I’ve had to place hacks into my CSS to account for these inconsistencies. It is a pain. Like CSS, web browsers could implement AJAX (XMLHttpRequest) functionality slightly differently. For me, I’d rather stay away from AJAX if at all possible. Adobe Flex I first noticed the power of Flash in ...