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What is the thought about AJAX

rdanner

How is the thinking at alfresco concerning AJAX

How do you see it or not see it playing with JSF

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Comments

gavinc

AJAX, if used properly can be very powerful. The danger is over using it in my opinion.

There are several components in Alfresco that would benefit from AJAX, particularly the picker components, so we will definitely be adding this capability at some point.

rdanner

They just seem to be a little bit at odds in terms of model. JSF reconstructs a set of events, AJAX wants to handle them in line. I am just wondering if the you think the two models will work well together, can work well together?

JSF doesnt have huge amounts of traction from the Java community yet. The last New England Java users group had almost 200 in attendence and anly a handful of us raised our hands to say we were using JSF.

the adoption rate is low because people are scared to get in and get started. AJAX seems to have a different thing happening. Its java script based, supported by atleast 2 major libraries and has this whole.

So in the end AJAX is nothing more then some javascript and dhtml. Thats cool. There is no magic. JSF is a great technology, the right technology but people are slow to get on board.

JSF apps also tend to be very "click intensive"
AJAX can help with this? maybe
but how do we make JSF components that work better with Ajax without messing too much with JSF? Or maybe we mess with JSF a lot

The biggest complaint I hear about alfresco UI is that it is "click heavy" and I hear it all the time from lots of people. JSF kinda leads to that in my oppinion. Its something we need to handle and I am wondering how we are going to go at the issue.

fselendic

There are some AJAXable JFS componets around, some of which are present in newest Suns Java Studio Creator 2 offering.

JSF is just about to explode in javaland. Every major big name is behind it, and now there are actually 3 or four very nice looking OS projects that are tackling known problems (facelets, then Gaving King is working with JSF on JBoss Seam stack, then theres Shale, "the next struts", and I think spring guys are also working on something, Spring-JSF or whatever).

Btw, there's a Oracle 100+ JSF components donation to MyFaces. Oracle guys are using JSF big time in their business apps. Some of those 100 components are supposed to have Ajax-like functionality.

My 2 cents: Next year this time JSF will be the mature enough, and excepted as THE standard way of writing Java GUIs. One of the things that will contribute to that fact is that JSF has plugable renderer (it actually has plugable everything). And you don't have to use JSP one. See facelets or XUL faces. And think Swing, SWT or XAML one.

rdanner

There are some AJAXable JFS componets around, some of which are present in newest Suns Java Studio Creator 2 offering.

JSF is just about to explode in javaland. Every major big name is behind it, and now there are actually 3 or four very nice looking OS projects that are tackling known problems (facelets, then Gaving King is working with JSF on JBoss Seam stack, then theres Shale, "the next struts", and I think spring guys are also working on something, Spring-JSF or whatever).

Btw, there's a Oracle 100+ JSF components donation to MyFaces. Oracle guys are using JSF big time in their business apps. Some of those 100 components are supposed to have Ajax-like functionality.

My 2 cents: Next year this time JSF will be the mature enough, and excepted as THE standard way of writing Java GUIs. One of the things that will contribute to that fact is that JSF has plugable renderer (it actually has plugable everything). And you don't have to use JSP one. See facelets or XUL faces. And think Swing, SWT or XAML one.

JSF is an obvious advancement and there are "big names" behind it. At the last New England Java Users group which had about 200 in attendance there where only a few (3) of us that raised their hands to say they were using JSF. I take this to indicate at some level (at least locally) that the developer community has not warmed up to the learning curve of JSF and are waiting for it to be tooled and well used and tested by others. Many folks use struts for example and they are not keen on switching away from something that "already works for them".

Shale is very exciting. Everything that Craig McClanahan touches has been great so far. I am excited to see where he is going to take Shale.

It seems that Ajax and JSF will be an interesting bread. Maybe they work well together, maybe not so hot. I haven't tried to build an Ajaxed JSF component. I wonder if there is any experience in our alfresco community or in the myFaces community building them.

Alfresco has a very nice interface but I get a lot of pushback that it requires a lot of clicks. I think JSF seems to inspire more clicks (take the upload page as an example, or adding categories to a content item).

It is possible that something like AJAX could make it easier to make a less clickable interface. Although that sounds a little bit like a solution out looking for a problem.

The click-heavyness is something to consider and put some effort in.

stevericker

well for what it's worth, we've found that reducing the clicks is one of the most important determinants of whether the user experience is positive or not (in the longer run). we've wrestled with the age-old complaint that the gui is really a big step back in long-term productivity over simple character-based interfaces, pretty much because of the difficulty in getting to where you need to go quickly (or with as few steps as possible).

so, from our end, reducing the number of clicks is a pretty high priority.

- steve

davidc

There are indeed areas of the Alfresco Web Client which are click heavy. So, we'll aim to improve that and other facets of user experience as time goes by. You're welcome to post your specific usability issues to the forum and they can be discussed - we do have a full-time UE person (Linton) who performs UI evaluations and usability trials.

We can't ignore AJAX, and it may reduce clicks, but ultimately, click count is related to user interface design, not the technology. That doesn't mean we dislike AJAX. I don't see any reason why it wouldn't sit side-by-side with JSF.

stevericker

david,

thanks for your thoughts. you guys are real responsive!

- steve

paulhh

Steve

Do hop over to the UI forum and start posting there. We're currently going through a redesign of the UI, the current design is a year old and we didn't know how it would evolve with added functionality. We do run remote usability sessions with wireframes and prototypes, so if you have an interest in participating let Linton know.

As mentioned, pickers is probably the first place we'll look at using AJAX. It's the amount of Javascript around AJAX that makes it a challenge for heavy-duty use - so we want to put our toes in the water first.

Cheers
Paul.

rdanner

Steve

Do hop over to the UI forum and start posting there. We're currently going through a redesign of the UI, the current design is a year old and we didn't know how it would evolve with added functionality. We do run remote usability sessions with wireframes and prototypes, so if you have an interest in participating let Linton know.

As mentioned, pickers is probably the first place we'll look at using AJAX. It's the amount of Javascript around AJAX that makes it a challenge for heavy-duty use - so we want to put our toes in the water first.

Cheers
Paul.

I was just going through a little growing pains with the apache JSF bridge. The ExternalContext they provide was returning the basic (the given id) on encodeNamespace. The spec says that portals shoulld return getNamespace()+pId;

Anyway, I was just thinking that since this is genereates unique javascript per portlet it is nice to JSF brining something to portlet development essentially for free.

lintonb

Steve,

As Paul mentioned we are currently redesigning the UI. We are in the very early stages and are trying to capture the main usability issues. It would be really useful if you could provide more details of your findings.

Thanks,
Linton