Re: Impressions of EGL - Part Duex

[Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nathan Andelin wrote:
> http://www.radile.com/rdweb/temp/rg2.html
>
> In the spirit of cooperation, I wrote another version of the radio group 
> page based on Joe Pluta's design of pairing a radio group with an image 
> element.
>
> I'd encourage folks to view the HTML source.  It references a JavaScript 
> file named xmlHTTP.js which I use in many Web applications and contains 
> a number of functions for handling AJAX requests.  I used the reqGet() 
> function to request an RPG program to set the image source.
>   
Understand though that you're really not doing standard RPG-CGI 
anymore.  You're using RPG to respond to AJAX requests, and while that's 
perfectly acceptable, it's a far cry from RPG-CGI.  You've got a whole 
support library of your own JavaScript functions, and the programmer has 
to write JavaScript to use it.  And then you're using your own library 
of RPG routines to format the response.

Don't get me wrong: using RPG to respond to AJAX requests is a fine 
design technique, and if I wanted to use your proprietary JavaScript and 
your proprietary CGI and I wanted to learn JavaScript, it would be 
fine.  It's definitely a well-crafted low-level API.

> Here's a link to the *** entire *** RPG source:
>
> http://www.radile.com/rdweb/temp/rgat.txt
>
> If you click one of the radio buttons to set focus then press and hold 
> down one of the arrow keys you can stress test the RPG program as the 
> browser sends repetitive requests to it.
>   
I'm confused.  How does the image source of the button change?  I assume 
there's some more plumbing in your JavaScript that does that.  And 
that's the part that gets difficult.  I can spend more time on the 
business issues.

For example, you've still hard-coded the buttons; I send the values in 
an array.

> An advantages to this approach is that you are free to design the page 
> as you like rather than being confined to the wigets supplied by EGL. 
> There's no intermediate process of generating HTML from JSF tag 
> libraries.  The RPG program is simple.  And performance is 
> extraordinary.
>   
I wasn't a fan of JSF, but it seems to be working pretty well.  I don't 
think I care anymore about intermediate processes; in the end, HTML 
itself is an intermediate process that gets rendered by the browser.  So 
whatever can help me generate that HTML as productively as possible wins 
in my book.  You also keep intimating that somehow JSF confines you; in 
what way are you confined by JSF?  I may be mistaken, but I think I can 
do anything in JSF that you can do in HTML; remember, JSF is just a 
superset.

Joe