AJAX Smackdown
My last session of the day was a panel discussion covering Dojo, Flex, DWR, JSF, and Swing/Java WebStart. The moderator asked a really good question. Does all the excitement over AJAX promote JavaScript as a first class language? Now, AJAX is a client pull mechanism and the moderator queried the panelist into a server push technology which some think might be needed in the future.
I am familiar with Flex but according to the Adobe representative, Flex is a free Flash base programming model that is more conventional to developers as oppose to the Flash timeline.
I was interesting to have the Swing perspective in this whole AJAX/Rich Internet application discussion. Responding to the argument that Swing is hard to learn and that it is hard to develop good UIs, Chet Haase joked that the API doubles as an IQ test.
It might be worth mentioning that in HTML that layout might seem easy with all those WYSIWYG editors and Java until recently didn’t have anything like that. Also with Swing you can position components absolutely with pixel perfect precision. In HTML the best you can do is give the browser hints as to position, not edicts.
This session also touched the issue of data binding which was covered in depth in Desktop Patterns And Data Binding. The key idea behind data binding is that it is important to have a consistent way in the language to be able to reach out and touch your data from the UI.
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