It's not just ajax, it's the whole idea of real time data (websocket/ajax/etc). Imagine a forum that automatically updated when someone made a new post. That's content, but it's also going to revolve around a constant stream of information from the server and you need a webapp to handle that. There are many more cases of when you are going to have a web application + content.

Speeds things up nicely, chrome web store is a great example of this. Fast is good especially when people are thinking about buying something.

For the effort on smaller traffic websites the speed improvement probably doesn't offer benefit when you add up the extra dev time. But it's still a fun learning exercise and should give you better pages at the end.

SEO is difficult, getting Google Analytics to work is a little tricky, but I haven't run into any cross browser problems yet at all. Weirdly history.pushstate doesn't seem to update the pages title as it should so I update with document.title which works fine, no idea why this is.

Yep, I didn't mean that web sockets will eliminate having to need JS on a client to take advantage of real time back/forth communication.

Not sure, backbone/ember/knockout/yui's MVC-module are just a few options. I haven't fully researched any of them because I haven't needed a reason to use them (yet).

I kind of feel like an app and page are no longer 2 separate things. Using rt's example of a forum that updates automatically is exactly why. Google also has a ws/ajax version of their blog ( http://buzz.blogger.com/ ).

That site is purely content but the user experience is so much nicer when the entire page doesn't reload. It doesn't matter what content is being served.

just for clarification, my original point was that js-heavy apps are the future, not necessarily ajax as the mechanism for doing updates.

possibly old but i hadn't seen it. my buddy referenced it after i asked him if something was web scale:

http://xahlee.org/comp/i/fault-tolerance_NoSQL.png

also my buddy works for the company that i start working for next monday, so i got a sneak peek of where i'll be sitting. nearby, there was a whiteboard upon which someone had written HASH ALL THE LISTS. i am excited about new jorb.

rt1, can you sell us some more on using ember.js?

Backbone+Underscore (backbone depends on underscore) weighs about 10k.
Ember weighs about 40k.

What makes ember so much better than backbone and why does it need 4x the amount of code to do basically the same thing as BB?

good explanation from creators of ember:

also, i think it's misguided to give more than a tiny bit of weight to that 30K. it's 2012, who cares? imo you should be thinking, "if framework A is even a little bit more productive to develop in than framework B and costs 30K more, i choose A." backbone might be right for you, there are legitimate reasons one could choose it over ember, but one of those reasons should not be the difference in size.

When I see something with a monster footprint it just makes me think "why the heck is it so big?".

When I compare 10k to 40k my thought process is basically this:

I'm about 30% concerned with...
"If people download my ember app they might have to wait 120ms more for the initial page load.".

I'm about 70% concerned with...
"From a technical POV why does it take 40k to do what something else can do in about 10k (or a little bit more if you need some BB plugins to match the functionality of ember).".

When you're dealing with a larger code base, you're dealing with more moving parts and more chances of errors. You're dealing with more chances of things going wrong and more chances of something being inefficient/bottleneck.

It boggles my mind how people blindly just throw jquery+twitter bootstrap on nearly every page they put together. Most of the time they have like 200k in scripts/css but only 10k of content.

Watching the video now, thanks.

That video really turns me off from ember. Their philosophy seems to be who cares about performance, let's just do as much magic as possible and let's force our opinions onto you to ensure your development process is as easy as possible.

I don't mind being told what to do (I welcome it in some cases) but magic bothers me a lot. I don't want the framework I'm using to make blind assumptions. I want to use it and my exceptions are it'll help me keep things in order.

this, imo, is exactly the correct philosophy and what i want from a framework. the main quote on tom dale's website is "Make decisions so your users don't have to". ofc, i'd add the caveat "within reason," and i'd add that this only works when you have really smart framework designers, but ember passes both caveats for me.

i get why you might not like this philosophy, it's a valid position, but experience has convinced me that ease of developer use is the single most important thing in software design. again with the caveat that you don't sacrifice too much wrt performance.

Speeds up things nicely until someone accesses your site in IE7/8 and suddenly the page keeps on hanging because the site is JavaScript heavy and the JS engine in IE sucks.

Chrome web store gets away with it because 99.9% of hits to it will be using a chrome browser, and I def think it is the way of the future, but I just dont think that your customers will have a good experience in some of the older browsers.

You're right yeah, we're lucky though as only 3.2% of our visitors are on IE8/7 which is low (6% total use IE).

Our customers do all their damn testing in IE, I hate it.

yeah, man. i'm with you. that's why i had to quit writing javascript apps -- it turns out there's a whole pile of browser and js engine code that enforces all kinds of design decisions!

so i decided to start writing native applications. but then it turns out that there are all these design decisions about windows and mouse events and file io.

so i decided to start writing operating systems. but low-level languages like c and c++ have lots of really weird design principles.

so i decided to write my own low-level language, but then it turns out those jackasses at intel have been making goofy decisions for like 30 years.

so now i live on a farm in the amish countryside. the community asked me to build a butter churn, but i don't think the design they gave me is very optimal...

Cool story. Let me guess, you're happily on the "omg use jquery, LOOK AT THOSE MOTION BLURS LOL!" bandwagon? If you want to at least to be amusing you should try harder.

For example, I could say that the ember developers are morons and cannot be trusted because they decided to release a "what is ember?" video with a global microphone that constantly picks up the sounds of a room full of slobs eating potato chips and coughing. No one gives a presentation like that about a serious product. Their product must be trash!

yeah, man. i'm with you. that's why i had to quit writing javascript apps -- it turns out there's a whole pile of browser and js engine code that enforces all kinds of design decisions!

so i decided to start writing native applications. but then it turns out that there are all these design decisions about windows and mouse events and file io.

so i decided to start writing operating systems. but low-level languages like c and c++ have lots of really weird design principles.

so i decided to write my own low-level language, but then it turns out those jackasses at intel have been making goofy decisions for like 30 years.

so now i live on a farm in the amish countryside. the community asked me to build a butter churn, but i don't think the design they gave me is very optimal...
lol

Same here!

A little drastic to move to an amish farm without even giving the "so I designed my own hardware" step a shot :/

Hardware hacking is for people who get confused at pointers to pointers to pointers.

I know a guy who pretty much has done that.

He wrote his own compiler, OS, and now CPU design.

He's very smart and a little odd.

I have listened in to 6 phone screens for an ETL developer position.

Sounds like a fairly cool job imo.

Seriously, who cares? I'm sorry if you have to wait an extra 120 ms or waste 40k in bandwidth (which you actually don't have to do each page load) but if that saves me a few days in developer effort - so be it. Why the hell would anyone sane optimize for that?

this.

clown,

i respond with the following fyp:

.



did he do this for fun, or to actually get work done? i'm guessing the former.



all aboard the LOOK AT THOSE MOTION BLURS LOL! bandwagon. choo choo!

also i'll give it another 6 months or so but i'm super curious to know what kinds of notes g_m has on me .