In the Shallow End 3074
Well, everyone had some kind of searching. The big difference is the UI; XP has a really terrible one involving a cross between a wizard...
Depends enormously on the the back-end environment you're using of the complexity. Even a framework like Struts, while hardly the most advanced available, simplifies maintaining state in the backend to the extent that it's essentially trivial.
Dan Johnson I'd say that the end user does care when problems start showing up. The...
Exactly, which is cheaper than the latest major update of your toy OS. Unfortunately, you couldn't get a major update from MS for ANY price in the last *six years*. We...
Edwin Google groups is buggy. There's overwhelming evidence of that. That's why it's a Beta. Linking directly to posts in thread view doesn't work. Had...
You've got 2 major ways of dealing with AJAX requests, and they both are capable of adding complexity in different areas. If you choose to send back a HTML response from your server and replace an element of the web page with it, you generally get a very nice, clean .html page, but can raise a number of questions for your server-side:
Can you present your data in an html format that is cross-browser compatible? Will you need a different method of handling internationalisation (if you do it) ? Before, you would (presumably) have a nice, clean seperation of business logic from presentation, with the former occuring entirely on the server and the latter entirely on the client. What if you need to change more than 1 single element on the page? Perhaps there are 3 different sections of the screen that need updating. You can spin off 3 seperate AJAX requests, but then your client is getting a bit chatty.
The other option is to send an XML object back to the client, and parse it through Javascript. This gives you a lot of flexibility, as you can send all sorts of stuff back, including new data for more than one element on the screen, plus some background status info the user doesn't need to see.
There are other areas you need to consider too. After AJAXing, there might well be serious logic implemented in Javascript on the front-end, which needs to be duplicated entirely on the server. This introduces the possibility of some very user-unfriendly bugs where the on-page logic tells you one thing and the server-side logic tells you another. There can also be issues with customers being unhappy with business logic being exposed to users via Javascript. The complexities of Ajax are minor though, compared to that other great pillar of Web 2.0, using DHTML to recreate the user interface behaviours of desktop apps.