Comments on: Nexaweb announces dojo.E markup and runtime

By: sfoster

sfoster — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:44:49 +0000

There is something kind of nice about building a UI with declarative markup like this. So instead of your server-side building tag soup, you build and manipulate an xml document to represent your UI. If you wanted to create a forms editor – a gui editor – having a structured xml representation to back it is going to get you there a lot faster. OTOH the drawbacks to declarative UI systems are always in the lack of expressive power in the markup – you trade a flexible scripting language for a limited set of elements and attributes.

I wonder his dojo.e compared to the dojox.wire project, as well as frameworks like backbase that are well established in this niche.

By: Rusco

Rusco — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:48:38 +0000

There is a much more lightweight jQuery based alternative:

malsup.com/jquery/taconite.

I use this with the eXist-Xml DB and notice a high developer productivity and low maintenance costs, leaving even RubyOnRails behind …

Rusco

By: polterguy

polterguy — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 10:35:54 +0000

@V1
Not all of us are using custom attributes, we’re not breaking XHTML ONE PLACE in our current SVN code now. (meaning no “custom attributes”)
Fact is we’re all attacking MSFT for being non-compatible, how can we expect them to be when the ones screaming the most are NOT…?
(Btw, I scream too, but at least we _try_)

By: V1

V1 — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:29:41 +0000

your allready using custom attributes, why not use custom namespaces -_-, if u wanted to make it easyer..

that looks like something… and its easy to understand for none developers =/

By: digitalIchi

digitalIchi — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:42:19 +0000

@polterguy,

I somewhat agree and somewhat disagree. Granted the things shown are not standards, more of a different approach to an already solved problem. The goal of the project is not to re-implement things that are already built. The first version is more of the foundation to built out a standard way to incorporate xml-based markup into Ajax application.

The W3C and others have created syntax that is very well defined, considered standards, open and useful to developing applications. Take for instance svg, Using this project I can take the SVG syntax and map it. Other W3C syntax like xml events, x-forms can also be brought into browsers not supporting it using dojo.E. This I would consider open web.

By: tj111

tj111 — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:36:48 +0000

I think the reason that this has such negative feedback is that the majority of readers on this site is that we are all to developer oriented to see some benefit in this. I agree, the syntax is ugly and there is little use of this from a standard developer’s perspective.

However, I think this would be very useful on some community oriented sites. For example, to allow users to create custom widgets, all you need to do is spit out some generated HTML, not rely on pre-made javascript functionality or generate any sort of javascript. I could develop an interface to allow people with no development experience to build their own custom Dojo widgets in about a day with this library (but I won’t).

So, for developing your site or applications, this is a horrible approach. But building an interface to allow custom widgets to be built is where this shines.

By: polterguy

polterguy — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:22:57 +0000

Looks a lot like .ASPX pages in fact, though .ASPX pages doesn’t propagate to the client meaning XHTML is not broken.
To “extend” the HTML standards like this is just plain ignorant…
Sorry Alex, this is NOT “Open Web”… :|

By: AaronHeckmann

AaronHeckmann — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:09:57 +0000

No thanks. That’s nasty.

By: pottedmeat

pottedmeat — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:00:46 +0000

This doesn’t excite me very much, but I’m sure there’s someone with a title like “senior enterprise analyst” that saw this and jumped for joy. If you think this is ugly syntax and messy design, you’d feel the same way about a lot of enterprise stuff, even though there’s a huge market for it, and the people that use it are quite happy with it.

By: soff

soff — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:16:11 +0000

huh? What an ugly syntax and messy design. Why on earth would one use this instead of DojoML, or some real clean/concise XML that actually provides value? Amazing.

By: soff

soff — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:07:53 +0000

huh?

By: digitalIchi

digitalIchi — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:00:51 +0000

@caston,

Great idea, I will look into that.

By: digitalIchi

digitalIchi — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:59:23 +0000

The why, is that not everyone in the world is a JavaScript and Ajax expert. Markup, whether people like it or think its fun to development in, does provide a base on which vendors can build tools that make it easier to build applications and shield them from implementation changes.

The other reason is that being able to respond from a server with modifications allows the developer to transition modification calls to the server. This can be really helpful for performing different tasks. Each of the pieces of the language can be used independently.

By: caston

caston — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:44:46 +0000

Even though the idea of embedding XML markup content with script tag is great (although old, consider aforementioned Backbase), I would recommend Nexaweb not to claim “text/xml” mime-type possession as this might create a lock on client-side technologies (suppose browsers implement that mime-type handler).
“text/nexaweb+xml” or “text/dojo.E+xml” would be more safe with this respect.

By: tora

tora — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:37:25 +0000

That’s the most ungodly stew of languages and syntaxes that one could imagine. Just one question–WHY?

By: robojax

robojax — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:24:26 +0000

Dojo.U for Useless.

Even if you did want to use tags you would use one embedded in the framework like Backbase.

By: JRice

JRice — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:59:04 +0000

Yeah, ’cause–you know–ColdFusion proved that coding in tags was so much more fun!