Good behaviour

This posting has been a while in coming, it wasn’t until I was at the geek dinner this weekend that I thought I would post this, the contrast between the two dinners was quite interesting, but I won’t go into that now.

At a previous geek dinner I found myself talking with Jeremy Keith of Clearleft and author of the book DOM Scripting (definitely worth a look), what was interesting was how the conversation focused on the good design and engineering principles for web page design. I was struck as to how the MVC ideas (mentioned previously) in the Client server world had found themselves similar concepts in the world of the browser.

One of the great ideas behind DOM Scripting is the separation of content from Behaviour, and design. This conversation seemed all the more relevant as having just standardized on an elegant way of doing this; we are faced with the problem of how to integrate  AJAX into this methodology.

In the world of  AJAX there seem to be three distinct approaches namely:

1 The use of Stubs – so examples would be SAJAX and DWR

2 The use of pure JavaScript libraries, e.g. DOJO and Prototype

3 The use of JavaScript generators like Ruby on Rails (or the PHP clone CakePHP)

All these methods currently seem to mix Behaviour (or Code) with the structure, very much in the old way. I’m hoping this changes in the future, and I’ll be keeping my eye on DOM Scripting and unobtrusive Java Scripting techniques where we can hope for a clear separation between, design, content and behaviour

Don