Re: The "Presentation" Layer

It is this shift more than anything which will sound the death knell for
the architecture Aaron proposes, where the server program dictates the
screens.

IMHO,

We (as/400 professionals) do NOT have a problem with our architecture. It's robust, scalable, and easy to program (create a program and run it). The "only" thing is, it's presentation is very limited and old fashioned, fixed chars 25x80, still the same as in the 70's, no - real - GUI capability, nothing.

We don't really need to adopt the browser and the client/server approach to give our apps a modern interface. It happens to be that our current presentation technology was already outdated in 1988, and "the browser" happened to become a standard, ubiquous client-side execution environment (also a means to escape the MS stranglehold on the desktop). This client/server approach with a standard client and no state (i.e. the "program" is loaded an started from scratch after each response from the server) results in more robust and more easiliy to deploy application. Compared to traditional client/server that is. It's a solution to a problem with traditional client/server computing. Not a solution to our problem. Our 70's presentation technology.

But, we now have a reasonably easy way to apply client/server computing using this standard client (i.e. the browser), EGL etc etc. Only thing is, existing IBM "i" programs have to be rebuilt to use this presentation technology.

IMO, this whole quest of trying to emulate with HTML and Javascript libraries what we already had for years on the desktop is reinventing the square wheel.

Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:58:47 -0500
From: joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To: web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [WEB400] The "Presentation" Layer

Nathan Andelin wrote:

Microsoft invested a ton in creating UI widgets that render as HTML on the server. Same with vendors of JSF tooling. Now we're seeing a shift to JavaScript frameworks that render themselves as DOM objects. No HTML is generated.

This is indeed a fundamental shift. Add to that the ability to ask for
data in small pieces a la AJAX, and what you have is Rich Client. It's
effectively a fat client framework in the browser. The entire premise
behind Web 2.0 is to remove the server-side controller and replace it
with services that are invoked by the client.

It is this shift more than anything which will sound the death knell for
the architecture Aaron proposes, where the server program dictates the
screens.

Eventually (sooner rather than later), servers will know nothing about
UI whatsoever, and will become pure message-based services. This is the
SOA model, and is a rational evolution (no pun intended) of the
client/server design.

Does that mean that JSF (and other page-at-a-time server-side
frameworks) are dead? Not yet. But they are at a disadvantage for a
lot of things.

Joe
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