Re: AJAX...

[Robert Cozzi <cozzi@xxxxxxxxx>]

Brad,

Obviously people/programmers can do what they want.
While the spirit of AJAX is "return what you want (data, HTML, XML, JS)" the
people working on it at Google, Microsoft, and in silicon valley seem to
advocate XML and server-side JavaScript generation as the two top return
"things".  HTML is problematic and not usually the choice. As Aaron
suggested each to his own.

The <DIV> and <SPAN> tags along with XML are, to me, the closest thing to a
DDS-like structure in HTML and works wonderfully and simply.
  
It is so much easier to implement XML for return data then to try to match
up the HTML tags in RPG, that I would probably only attempt returning HTML
in very specific/unique situations.

The cool thing is that once you write or steal an Ajax XML parsing script
that populates the <DIV> or <SPAN> tags, you can clone it and avoid a lot of
debugging issues--with HTML, you never avoid the debugging problems.

This is what the google, Yahoo, Dojo, and other "frameworks" do. In fact,
the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) is light weight and effective. DOJO is a bit
heavier but more powerful for wiz-bang features.

-Bob 
 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On
> Behalf Of Brad Stone
> Sent: Thursday, September 21, 2006 5:42 PM
> To: Web Enabling the AS400 / iSeries
> Subject: Re: [WEB400] AJAX...
>
> So, do you return XML and then convert that to HTML?
>
> Seems like extra work to me.  :)
>
> Have you found any ways to debug AJAX such as view the source returned on
> the page, etc?  IT stinks that you can't even save the page with the dynamic
> information inserted and see the *ML that was sent back from the app.
> That's the main thing that's holding me back on implementing it more.
>
> I had a huge shopping application for a customer set up with AJAX but
> decided to go back to standard scripts because I was finding debugging a
> pain.  Not that I insert any bugs into code mind you.  :)
>
> Brad