Nooooo, not another ajax framework!!

Posted by anthony crumley, Sat Mar 24 23:01:00 UTC 2007

“Rich internet application, how do I create thee? Let me count the ways.” Flex, Rails, Lazlo, .NET, dojo, and on and on ad infinitum. There are choices coming out our ears, each with their own special genius and insanity. Why add yet another choice? Because I can. Because I want to. Because someone else may like it. Because there must be an easier way. Because I want to be just like DHH. :) While all these reasons may be true, fundamentally, I am doing this to express myself, to make a noise, to be heard, well at least I hope someone hears me. Is anyone listening? Is there anybody out there?

Well, just in case someone is listening, here are the characteristics of this new nameless framework in no particular order.

• It is entirely Javascript based.
• It is friendly to designers, except when they get the parens and braces out of whack.
• Developers will love it.
• It embraces the DOM and its markup origins rather than trying to hide it beneath layer upon layer of confusion abstraction.
• It makes the normal simple and the abnormal possible.
• It is based on the Model View Controller pattern (aren’t they all).
• It could be described as a domain specific language for web development.
• It doesn’t care how the model works. If you like complexity use Java. If you like limitations use .NET. If you want to be cool use Rails.
• It prefers convention over configuration ($1 to Rails).
• It embraces the under appreciated beauty of Javascript and does not try to be Ruby or Java or object oriented.
• It uses the prototype library and embraces many rubyisms regardless of the previous statement.
• It tries to be easy on the eyes. No jungle of cluttered, wordy, and redundant code to hack through.
• It is friendly to various effect libraries.
• There is a real focus on creating beautiful code. We are artists and craftsmen not scientist and engineers.
• It pushes the user our friend’s interface entirely to their machine saving processing power on the server. (People who use our creations are our friends and we should appreciate them. Our works would be pointless without them.)

More details to come…

BTW, if you have any name suggestions, I’m listening too.

Filed Under: Pseudo | Tags: Javascript Framework