New Ajax Framework Protowidget Introduced

JavaScriptSearch
Tuesday, May 30, 2006; 03:27 AM

The large family of Ajax / JavaScript development frameworks was further expanded with the addition of another web development tool.  Protowidget is developed by small IT company Redcode with the goal of meeting the specific needs of their customers. As the name suggests, it is driven by "the simplicity of Prototype, the widgets/templates from Dojo and the event-based property binding support from OpenLaszlo/Flex."

Protowidget was announced with an extensive article on Redcode owner Terry Laurenzo's blog at http://www.rcode.net/blog/tlaurenzo/introducing-protowidget.  Here is how he describes the shortcomings of various AJAX frameworks he has used, which made him go with the creation of Protowidget:

• ID-madness: Some frameworks (ie. Dojo) attempt to avoid this, but most make the primary coupling point between JavaScript and HTML be the ID attribute. While many have shown this to work, it is somewhat offensive to have only one flat namespace. This becomes an especial problem when trying to create repeating sections or scoped, re-usable components. Since the namespace is flat, it also causes problems when one component needs to logically interact with others.
• Non-standard UI construction: At the end of the day, HTML+CSS is a pretty good tool for laying out web-based UIs. We can certainly come up with better representations, but they are rarely as rich and they are typically not designer friendly. Despite a lot of other great ideas, I consider this to be OpenLaszlo’s primary failing. Other frameworks which take the Swing-esque approach of coding the UI programatically by assembling objects are even weaker.
• No client side model: Years ago someone co-opted the long standing MVC design pattern and claimed that having servlets and views somehow conformed to the pattern. Maybe it technically does, but it is certainly not in the spirit of MVC as seen in real client-side apps. Today, we have an interesting inversion going on where most people think that the web-MVC (type II or whatever) pattern is classical-MVC. We need to be applying some classical-MVC principles to our client-side interfaces. Otherwise, we will end up with as much spaghetti as can be found in an old-school VB6 app. OpenLaszlo and Flex with their pervasive property bindings provide the building blocks for this type of development. Few others do.
• Separating form from function: This is the holy grail, and likely no tool will ever get 100% there. The idea is that the visual layout and characteristics should be specified out-of-band from the code that manipulates it. A good framework should have well-defined intersection points where the visual bits mix and interact with the programmatic bits.

Protowidget is in the initial stages of development, and it remains to be seen whether the new framework will address the issues, listed above, properly.  A simple demonstration of Protowidget is available at http://www.rcode.net/stage/trunk/protowidget/test/bind_test.html .  Current snapshop of source code (45KB ZIP file) is at http://www.rcode.net/stage/protowidget_2006_05_29.zip .

The number of Ajax / JavaScript development frameworks has been rising steadily in recent months.  According to various counts, there are between 100 and 150 of them.