John,
The way Scott has described Profound UI (and I don't have much more to
go on than that) is that it is indeed designed to be accessible to
display file programmers (it's *steeped* by the way, as in tea leaves
that have been sitting in water for a long time) BUT ALSO to allow
that second group of programmers to do their thing if they want.
Thanks for the correct spelling of "steeped". It appears to me that what
Scott was referring to was the idea of attaching JavaScript to "events"
pertaining to visual components in the PUI Visual Designer (i.e. code
belonging to a button "click).
The problem with that is the code becomes part of display file and is
streamed to the PUI component (I want to say "applet" or "client") with
each "record" output. The data streams sent to the applet are already quite
verbose (often 20K to 50K) in size - just to "describe" the layout of the
screen. JavaScript would add verbosity beyond that, and is geared to
"event" handling as opposed to general flow / control.
I advocate for a paradigm shift away from display files. Perhaps the best
way to illustrate would be with an example of an application which offers
benefits that you won't find under the traditional display file paradigm.
http://rd.radile.com/rdweb/phones/phonelist.html
This is a good example of a "single page application" with "responsive UI
design". It works by using a framework which "merges" HTML and JSON which
are downloaded to the browser at runtime. There is an option for "caching"
both the HTML and the JSON for the duration of the session which eliminates
unnecessary server I/O, CPU, bandwidth, etc.
The UI is dozens of times more efficient. It adapts well to any screen size
(i.e. smart phone, tablet, desktop display). Browser back and forward
buttons work. JavaScript is cached. HTML templates are cached. JSON is
cached. These are attributes of the single-page paradigm.
The "applet" approach used by PUI is not the same. UI layouts and data
values and "code" are streamed back and forth between the client and the
server with every record write / read combo.
HTH,
Nathan.
midrange.com
