From: Demian K. <dem...@vi...> - 2013-07-19 18:39:43
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I'm definitely in favor of reducing the use of the AjaxController in favor of more localized and pragmatic solutions. Regarding the idea of AJAX-based tabs, this was discussed a long time ago but never went very far (though there is a 1.x patch in JIRA that gets us at least partway there). See http://vufind.org/jira/browse/VUFIND-426<http://vufind.org/jira/browse/VUFIND-426.>. I like the fact that VuFind works pretty well without scripting, but we wouldn't necessarily have to break that to improve performance with AJAX -- the tab routine could return different results depending on whether the request isXmlHttpRequest() or not. Regarding opportunistic preloading, my only concern is that we'd need to disable it for certain tabs -- I don't think we would want to trigger tons of calls to third-party APIs (e.g. reviews, excerpts) "just in case," especially since some services may have limits on them. - Demian ________________________________ From: Joe Atzberger [jo...@bo...] Sent: Friday, July 19, 2013 1:15 PM To: vufind-tech Tech Subject: [VuFind-Tech] JSON-data delivery Has there been any thought towards delivering more data from the backend to the client as JSON? (For example, the details page description data.) I'm not all-in for it, but I think it would be useful and wanted to air some thoughts about it. Obviously this would not support javascript-less users (I don't think there are any such users anymore, even JAWS handles js). But it would get us completely out of the intermingling of display and retrieval that happens, for example, in the record tabs. One might argue it makes selenium or other testing more difficult, until you realize that testing the JSON itself is way easier. I know my UI dev would love it. Performance: we would expect (at least 1) more request(s) per page. But correctly and asynchronously delivered we could now separate out and properly cache data elements based on their volatility/longevity. This would be unlike the current AjaxController that forces no-cache. This approach would make it easier to, for example, opportunistically pre-load the data for non-current record tabs so that selecting them is instantaneous. Has anyone moved in this direction? Are there Zend/PHP hangups I'm not thinking of? --joe |