Re: Impressions of EGL - Part Duex

Nathan Andelin wrote:

http://www.radile.com/rdweb/temp/rg2.html

In the spirit of cooperation, I wrote another version of the radio group page based on Joe Pluta's design of pairing a radio group with an image element.

I'd encourage folks to view the HTML source. It references a JavaScript file named xmlHTTP.js which I use in many Web applications and contains a number of functions for handling AJAX requests. I used the reqGet() function to request an RPG program to set the image source.

Understand though that you're really not doing standard RPG-CGI anymore. You're using RPG to respond to AJAX requests, and while that's perfectly acceptable, it's a far cry from RPG-CGI. You've got a whole support library of your own JavaScript functions, and the programmer has to write JavaScript to use it. And then you're using your own library of RPG routines to format the response.

Don't get me wrong: using RPG to respond to AJAX requests is a fine design technique, and if I wanted to use your proprietary JavaScript and your proprietary CGI and I wanted to learn JavaScript, it would be fine. It's definitely a well-crafted low-level API.

Here's a link to the *** entire *** RPG source:

http://www.radile.com/rdweb/temp/rgat.txt

If you click one of the radio buttons to set focus then press and hold down one of the arrow keys you can stress test the RPG program as the browser sends repetitive requests to it.

I'm confused. How does the image source of the button change? I assume there's some more plumbing in your JavaScript that does that. And that's the part that gets difficult. I can spend more time on the business issues.

For example, you've still hard-coded the buttons; I send the values in an array.

An advantages to this approach is that you are free to design the page as you like rather than being confined to the wigets supplied by EGL. There's no intermediate process of generating HTML from JSF tag libraries. The RPG program is simple. And performance is extraordinary.

I wasn't a fan of JSF, but it seems to be working pretty well. I don't think I care anymore about intermediate processes; in the end, HTML itself is an intermediate process that gets rendered by the browser. So whatever can help me generate that HTML as productively as possible wins in my book. You also keep intimating that somehow JSF confines you; in what way are you confined by JSF? I may be mistaken, but I think I can do anything in JSF that you can do in HTML; remember, JSF is just a superset.

Joe