Simon Willison wrote: > > > On 14 Nov 2005, at 07:10, swrainey wrote: > >> Ajax is really hot right now and I could see loosing some developers >> because it's not as on the forefront of the whole web 2.0 hyped up >> junk. Ajax is more about usability than eye candy or at least it should >> be. That being said. I know I can use ajax really easy inside of a >> django project but will anyone choose another framework based on most >> of the other ones having "ajax support". > > > For me "Ajax support" really is pure marketing fluff - as far as I'm > concerned EVERY web framework supports Ajax unless it does something > truly moronic like refuse to let you output documents that don't have > the standard header/footer template. > > That said, I know my way around JavaScript and prefer to write it by > hand. I imagine there are many developers out there who don't and > prefer having the framework do the work for them. The Ajax support in > Rails is my least favourite feature, precisely because I like to have > full control over how my JS works - but it makes a lot of Rails > developers very happy indeed. > > At the very least, it is useful to have your framework make a few > decisions/recommendations for you - things like which XMLHttpRequest > cross-browser abstraction to use. I mould tend to look towards MochiKit > for that kind of thing since it's more Pythonic than other JavaScript > libraries, taking a lot of its ideas from Python features. > > One thing that would be very cool would be some built in support in > Django for outputting JSON, which is a really neat format for sending > data to and from the server via XMLHttpRequest. Maybe a custom template > tag or filter would be useful here. > > I know the Ajax in Django discussion has been going on for a long time, > but maybe it's time to take a closer look at it now that we're thinking > about features for 1.0. After all, in the ultra competitive world of > Web Frameworks marketing is important. > > Cheers, > > Simon >
One thing to note here: When we get rid of core fields, we are going to want to use both ajax & drag and drop in order to implement ticket #13. It would be nice to use some "consistent" framework to do this, rather than picking random bits of javascript up from around the internet. Another thing to consider is ajax (pre-submit) form validation. So we do have a need for goals within django itself which would best be served by bundling a consistent js library set : its not just for users. I think that Mochikit is probably the best option, being fairly light and pythonic. It doesn't include drag and drop or many effects - but it should be possible to port anything we need from eg dojo or scriptaculous, and maybe some turbogears people will beat us to it ;-P ).
