Re: Single Page Applications

It's difficult to format a reply on a phone in sections as you have done below. I wasn't suggesting that the "only" thing the server does is respond exchange a data model and nothing else. There are lots of other things that the server has to do, like interact with third party applications or create PDFs for streaming etc - but the bread and butter method for delivering the UI is much easier to understand and quicker to develop (for us) using client side UI components, compared to the old cgidev2 method of delivering content. By two way binding I mean that changes made to the model (made in the client or the server) automatically cause a reaction in the UI, and vice versa. It's only two way for things that can be changed in the UI by the user though, like an input field or clicking a button. For a grid, binding would be to a model attribute that contains an array. If the grid has input capable columns two way binding still takes place, otherwise it's one way.

Maybe we just find it easier because the amount of code we have to write is much less than it used to be, and our components are auto-documented using jsdoc:
rn6.coraltreesystems.com:9089/doc/RNS.Component.html

I am not sure how angular does it, but we have a markup language (hybrid of XML and html really) called RML in which we define a UI for a function - it's just a set of components with their options bound to data model attributes. Since components are feature rich, the actual RML, even for a complex function, is very lightweight, and so is the rpg server program that handles it's requests. The RML can be created with a wysiwyg editor or a simple XML editor using xsd validation. A development efficiency improvement on our cgidev2 stuff.

We also make liberal use of web sockets for pushing data to clients where appropriate, so in theory many of the things we used to use polling for now work more efficiently.



On 27 May 2015, at 18:33, Nathan Andelin <nandelin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I think you are suggesting that returning JSON data is not as safe and
efficient as returning the html itself. The latter is what you would be
doing in a traditional cgidev2 application, but we have dumped that method
(although it is still supported) in RNS 6.

Of course Brad can speak for himself, but I don't think he was suggesting
that one approach was safer or better than the other; just that there are
many alternatives for generating browser pages, including server-based and
client-based frameworks/techniques.

I would suggest that client-based frameworks such as Angular JS should not
entirely replace server-based frameworks. You might continue to use
server-based techniques to generate HTML reports (stream files), transform
them into PDFs, and stream either format to browser clients.

You get a much more efficient process, and a much faster development time,
if you use the data model approach (basically the JSON) with two way
binding on the visual components. Now the developer can just arrange
components on the page and bind certain elements to data model properties.

Could you be more specific about the efficiency gains and developer
productivity? Are you suggesting that client-side tools and utilities
streamline development? If so, then how?

The model gets exchanged between the client and the server, and the RPG
part of the process is now lightweight compared to some of the complicated
cgidev2 programs we used to have.

I understand that, because browser page (UI) generation is being moved from
the server to the client.

Our data grid component can do page by page loading, filtering, sorting on
huge files just as easily as a green screen subfile can.

That's good, but it doesn't sound like 2-way binding. Or is it?
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