Re: The "Presentation" Layer

From: Maurice O'Prey
Hi Nathan
The ASP.NET ListView control was introduced in 3.5 for just this?

Maurice,

I watched a demo of using the ListView control at http://www.asp.net. It struck me that there were both similarities and contrasts between server-side component libraries like asp.net and client-side component libraries like Ext js.

They're similar in that they both use declarative syntax to define components along with bindings with data sources.
They contrast in that server-side components generate HTML on the server and output it to the browser, while client-side components run entirely in the browser and generate DOM elements. And client-side components implement rich behaviors. Another contrast is in the support tooling. Visual Studio offers wysiwyg, drag & drop, wizards, code complete, and property sheets to assist with code generation. I'm not aware if that kind of tooling is available for rich UI component libraries.

The approach I'm starting to settle on is more in the middle. I see value in implementing a few rich-UI behaviors, but I don't like being saddled with downloading a boat-load of JavaScript to the client. I lean more toward creating a few light-weight components of my own that implement essential UI behaviors, but implement most of the presentation layer in HTML, using Dreamweaver - for now.

Nathan.