[Wheat-developer] AJAX

[Mark L. <ma...@gl...>]

There has been lots of rumbling around the web about AJAX.  After all, 
after anyone has played with Google Maps, why would anyone want to go 
back?

In addition, talks with Rohit Khare, Donovan Preston and Kragen Sitaker 
have explored how best to build richer applications with systems like 
Wheat and Nevow.  One set of ideas centers around how, if you delegate 
part of your page to another object:
	tt-foo(): { #expand(subject: #subject.sub-thing) }
That this expansion could be migrated to take place in the client (!).  
In fact, as that object, through its templates interacts with the user, 
all of that interaction might take place inside the already loaded 
page.  What is most interesting to me about this is that I think it can 
be done in a way that is very clean to the programmer, and degrades to 
normal round trips when the browser can't handle it.

Meanwhile I've been thinking crazier thoughts:  Moving part of the 
application to the client is a pain: The language is different 
(JavaScript), the environment different (the DOM, or rather the 
intersection/union of various DOM implementations), and programming 
metaphor a total switch (from the data objects themselves to once again 
essentially procedural coding based on the UI).  What if... What if we 
ran Wheat in the client?  Really!  Treat the per-client state, that 
we'd rather keep on the client (rather than in the session), as a Wheat 
tree of objects rooted at the client.  Treat interaction between client 
and server as interaction between Wheat objects in different trees 
(though all rooted in the same, global Internet tree!)

And since a client based Wheat implementation wouldn't need all the 
fancy mount point stuff, I think an implementation wouldn't be that 
hard in JavaScript (!).  As for compiling methods we could either 1) 
write an interpreter in JavaScript (there are only, what 16 
bytecodes)?, or 2) compile to JavaScript!

Okay, okay, this is getting rather ahead of ourselves.....  But it is a 
curious idea, no?

	- Mark