I agree with you that it's pure marketing fluff and I guess you see that
was my point. It just got me to thinking when I was reading about
developer adoption. I do like your lightweight ideas. It might be good
to do something rather lightweight and then get some visibility on the
website about Django working with Ajax. Or maybe just try to find
another way to get some ajax visibility without building it into the
core framework.
I work with a partner who was checking out django and ruby on rails. And
his first comment was, it doesn't look like it supports ajax. To him
ajax is highly important not because of eye candy but because we use it
to make applications more usable. I was able to assure him that django
does support ajax.
This is from a pure marketing perpesctive. I guess what I'm saying is
that I just want to make sure that it doesn't get completely written off
because of that. Being a programmer I'm more interested in the technical
goodness, but I'd like to see this also address marketing concerns as
well to gain more community interest and developer adoption.
Just wanted to throw in a different perspective.
Robert Wittams wrote:
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 ).
