Looking for information on this technology...

[Replicon]

I was talking to someone, and they were mentioning that one really big development that's coming in web technology is a kind of library sharing, where you can decide whether your code/business logic executes on the server side or the client side. I'm very interested in this.

I did a bit of research, and it looks like he might have been referring to ECMAScript (JavaScript) version 4, combined with JSON (for serialization). Is this basically it, or is there something else like that in the works?

Really, I'm trying to find new and interesting web technologies we can use at the office, but this seemed like a good lead to follow. Thoughts?

 

[CycloWizard]

I'm not an expert in this area by any means and have only a basic understanding, but maybe this info will be helpful to you. There are many existing scripts/code libraries that run over the internet. There are some that are compiled by the client each time they load a particular page, such as .asp (and Javascript, I believe) documents. There are others that are compiled once by the author of the code and the code is executed server-side, such as .aspx. I think the general trend is to make things execute on the server side from pre-compiled code to speed things up.

Anyway, like I said, take this with a grain of salt, but hopefully that helps a little.

 

[Replicon]

Thanks for your input. I'm definitely aware of the asp/jsp/mason-like technologies. I'm more looking into something that can accomplish AJAX-y stuff, but using a system that isn't so much of a mess to develop in (ajaxifying is kind of a pain in the ass).

 

[NanoStuff]

You should look into Ruby on Rails. You can create 'ajax' by writing fairly logical server side code that will automatically generate the necessary remote calls. Obviously this still requires javascript on the client side, even though you will not be writing any client side code.

For example, replacing html text would go something like,

page[:elementid].replace_html "replaced html" in an .rjs template for the application and short link_to_remote tag in the rhtml template. All are server side files generated on request.

 

[Replicon]

Ruby on Rails is _definitely_ on my list of things to look into. I hear really good things about it.