On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 11:56 AM, Chris Cunnington smalltalktelevision@gmail.com wrote:
In Seaside it's mainly pure JavaScript. Not a lot of abstraction over the JavaScript there. It's an interesting question what the sweet spot of abstracting over JavaScript really is. Altitude has none. Seaside has lots. For this JSON example it sort of looks the same on both frameworks.
Yeah, it's quite similar because there's very little happening on the server side. The Javascript in the browser does all the work, so all the server is doing is rendering one tag and a snippet of Javascript.
I've thought a little bit about Javascript abstraction in Altitude, but it's tricky. One of the fundamental things about modern web apps is that they involve a lot of Javascript in the browser. There are gazillion ways of writing that Javascript, with a ton of JS frameworks, programming styles, preprocessing tools and your-favourite-language-to-javascript compilers. It seems like baking any fixed way of handling Javascript into Altitude would just limit what could be done on the client side. There are a few things that could be really useful—e.g., a DAV server and some way of storing Javascript within the image—but I can't really see doing anything to eliminate the need to write Javascript.
Colin