Just picked this up via bb’s post, that Ryan Carson is saying client/server MVC is soooooo old school (some might say dead). From his post:

… The basic client-server model still dominates. Objective-J and SproutCore change all that. They allow you to create true desktop-like apps right inside the browser. They don’t rely on a continous web connection and they are as quick as desktop apps.

Ahhh .. yep. Already on it. In fact, got a demo app here that pretty much blows away Sproutcore’s demo. It’s got all the good oil .. static app download, service layer, rich and stateful UI. This ain’t Silverlight or AIR, it’s straight up JavaScript/HTML/CSS.

Of course you’ve got Dojo, Mootools, GWT, Prototype, TIBCO GI, YUI, Ext JS .. the list goes on (I actually use an old library, the domAPI as the basis of my custom widgets). However *none* of these toolkits tackle statefull in-browser navigations. Check this out, here’s our in-store system:

See all those buttons down the bottom? They’re our modules. Members is currently highlighted .. that’s the Members module. Now, lets say I see a problem with some movie data, I hit the Titles button and we go to the Titles module, which is our movie CMS. Now the hip thing is that when we fire up the Titles module, the members module is left in tact. It’s statefull. I can switch back to it and hey-presto .. it’s as I left it. I can then switch back to the Titles module, and still be mid-edit on 3:10 to Yuma. This behaviour is incredible. It means you can context-switch in between doing anything, and not lose where you were.

You might notice these modules aren’t exactly light-weight either. The members module has 4 tabs, 3 internal windows, search drop down and 3 sortable grids. Our movie CMS has 5 tabs, 3 colour pickers, 6 sortable grids, tinyMCE embedded, 7 internal windows and numerous lookups. The other modules are equally hairy. It can take 15 seconds for our Titles modules to fire up .. but once it’s instantiated it stays there and keeps it’s state. From then on, navigating to it is instantaneous.

I’d love to open source the APPLEBOX app framework and help spread this new paradigm of web development. But right now my focus is on APPLEBOX as a business .. and that’s a very different beast to getting the technology right.

Posted June 26th, 2008 under Technology and Coding.
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