Re: the RPG problem - adrift in the PC-web wind

From: Joe Pluta
 The only thing about this is that you are perpetuating the 5250-ish 
style of development. Not that that's a bad thing!  But in the world of
rich user interfaces, you really need a much more responsive UI.

That's a good point. When I mentioned the idea of using RPG to replace field markers in HTML templates I was a little afraid that people might think I was stuck on traditional page-at-a-time interfaces. Actually, that's just a starting point. It's also really important to be able create and update UI elements dynamically and incrementally through additional asynchronous requests (AJAX). I think the best user interfaces have a mixture of both. For those who may be just getting into Web development, the easiest thing to begin with seems to be traditional page-at-a-time interfaces. Inquiry and reports are good starting points.
  

Widgets that appear dynamically and pages that resize as needed are much
more applicable to complex GUI applications than marked up HTML pages.

Again, that may depend on whether you're doing inquiry or maintenance, or some other activity. But it's a good point.

That's the beauty of most of the JavaScript frameworks; it's quite easy
to make very dynamic UIs.

I have mixed feelings about that. I generally prefer interfaces which are initially built from HTML tags over those that are generated purely by JavaScript renditions. I dislike the appearance of a parasol or sun dial or hour glass as the browser is working on rendering components built from script. JavaScript can be very powerful, but a little goes a long way in my book.

I strongly agree that building components dynamically is a good thing to learn and know how to do. I just use it more judiciously than people or tools which may be stuck on frameworks.

We did a 6-7 minute video about a year ago on one of our applications for school teachers that might be interesting for some, just to get an idea of the different types of interfaces we use, which range from traditional page-at-a-time, to ones that behave a lot like Excel spreadsheets.

http://www.relational-data.com/promo/gradebook/gradebook.php ;


-Nathan