Re: A live EGL demo application

Nathan Andelin wrote:

Joe,

It was helpful to try a live demo. It helped me to better understand your your drum-roll posts about EGL and pairing EGL clients with RPG servers which seems like good architecture to me.

I thought you'd appreciate that.

I monitored the client-server message interactions using Fiddler to better understand what was going on under the covers and did some stress testing via repeated mouse clicks on some of the buttons.

I saw you <smile>.

The part that was quite a bit off my radar screen was the 700K plus bytes of JavaScript client code. In my eight years as a Web application developer I don't think I've written a total of 700K in JavaScript. As I perused the code, it appeared to be generated, as opposed to being written from scratch.

If you look at it, you'll see that much of it is a JavaScript framework similar to the Protoype framework that allows JavaScript to easily fashion its own classes. This part of the code is a technology preview, so it is going to be a bit on the heavy side; I hope to see some good reduction in code as the product progresses. At the same time, we added GZip to the server and the download time was reduced dramatically.

From EGL discussions on midrange lists, I had the impression that EGL was primarily a server-side code generator that leveraged JSF, but the demo client led me to gather that EGL can be used to generate rich JavaScript clients.

Ah, that's the beauty of EGL. EGL describes a "PIM" or platform-independent model, which is then driven to a platform-specific model (PSM) by the generator. That means that common entities (especially the metadata definitions) are completely transportable from the server-side to the client-side. This is what makes it so incredibly simple to write EGL on both sides of the wire and have them talk to each other, even if one is generating server-side Java and the other client-side JavaScript. It's hard to describe how powerful this is unless you've actually used it.

I liked the iPhone metaphor, but one suggestion for Chris Laffra is that the UI would look better and be more intuitive if the iPhone behaved like a container instead of just a background image, so record lists remained within the boundaries of the iPhone, and scrollbars appeared within the iPhone.

Thanks. I know he'd love to do that, but really the only way to do that without a ton of extra code would be with an iFrame, and iFrames are temperamental little guys. I think his thinking is that if you really want to see it on a iPhone, use an iPhone <grin>.

Overall, it was impressive.

Again, thanks. High praise indeed from one of the more innovative RPG web developers in the community.

Joe