[Klug-general] Interactive Websites

[Jonathan Moss]

On Thu Dec  7  7:53 , 'Peter Childs' <peterachilds at gmail.com> sent:

I have done quite a bit of web application development in the last few years and
in particular, used the combo you where planning to use DOJO/PHP/HTML/CSS.

I split the project into two sections:

A backend server written in PHP using JSON-RPC to communicate with the outside
world.  XML was just too slow on the client side.  This all works fine and I
would be happy to recommend PHP for this side of things.

When it came to writing the front end I did a lot of trawling to find a suitable
toolkit.  I eventually settled on Dojo since it seemed to have all the right
features and was cross-browser.  However, we it came to actually writing some
code the documentation was so poor it was taking days to do some pretty simple
stuff like adding nodes to trees dynamically! I'm pretty sure they have fixed a
lot of these issues now but in the end the lack of documentation led me to give
up on Dojo for now.  

In the end I settled on the Google web toolkit (GWT) partially because I am
already familiar with Java. As you say the GWT is written in Java and you program
the interface in Java. However, it actually compiles the code into JavaScript.
GWT does not have all the bells and whistles of Dojo in terms of visual effects
but it is very well written in has *excellent* documentation.  Also because your
code is written in Java there is loads of support in most modern IDE's and since
it is compiled you can catch a lot of coding mistakes before they get into the
final product.  If you want to go the whole hog the GWT also provides it's own
RPC framework that hooks into Serverlets (or however you spell it!) quite
seamlessly from what I have read.

And no I don't work for Google (much is the pity :)

I hope this helps,
Jon


>Right Second post in ten minutes, its been rather quite so I thought
>this place needed some livening up. Unless your all positing on the
>wiki now and I can't be be bothered to look, I have wiki and forums..
>and that comes from someone using gmail......
>
>I need to create a interactive web site, Rather not give details its
>for work. Basically we have a large C++ Qt application and and want to
>transfer it or enhance it with an interactive website.
>
>Anyway I'm trying to work out what tools to use because I'm getting a bit lost.
>
>I mean the web just has too many bits.
>
>Php/Perl/Java/SSI (Pick one)
>Html
>Javascript (with all its ie/firefox/opera differences)
>CSS (Yes thats a 4th complely different language)
>AJAX (Which is really more of an idea than a langauge)
>GWT (Oh that encapsulates most of the above into java)
>JPEG
>PNG
>GIF
>ActiveX
>Flash
>
>Are you confused yet?
>
>I want to know where to start what to use.
>
>I've been looking at Dojo/Php/HTML/CSS but thats still 4 complete
>different langaues to learn which does not help. And I'm a programmer
>not a designer so I should be able to cope. But I don't know how a
>Designer with no programming skills would cope with the web currently.
>
>Please bring back the paper and pencil at least then you only had to
>chouse between type of pen/pencil and type of paper....
>
>Peter.
>
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