John's assessment is insightful. It's
hard to know exactly why some products really take off while
others have difficulty in lift-off. One comment about Dojo's new
AMD paradigm (I think since version 1.7): the upside is a set of
light(er) weight modules that you declare individually; the
reverse is true too: often you have to load 10 or more modules.
Otherwise, Dojo has a lot of functionality, and certainly datagrid
and AJAX-based stores make it terrific for a data-centric app like
LedgerSMB.
Thanks.
Brian
On 07/30/2013 02:48 PM, John Locke wrote:
Thanks.
Brian
Brian Wolf
Phone: 410.367.2958
Email: ..hidden..
Try out Activus
Secure Payments™, our recurring payments
application.
Demo at http://demo.activustech.com
Hi,
I just did a quick review of what Ember.js is, and what its strengths and weaknesses are, compared to Dojo. This assessment is definitely not coming from experience with Ember, but with a lot of Dojo experience, so I'm sure it's biased. But here's what I noticed:
Ember strengths:
- Routes, more opinionated management of controllers within the page
- Single DOM event listeners for entire application
- Views automatically delay re-rendering, possibly more streamlined DOM updates with less iterations
Ember weaknesses:
- Ember.data stores seem to be far less developed than dojo's stores and data objects, and still marked with an unstable warning
- Not seeing any declarative way of adding widgets to existing code -- means there's a lot more effort involved to get results
As I look at this, I still wonder why Dojo is shunned in so many circles. It is really a pioneer in this area, providing a huge amount of the functionality that's in Ember, and it provided it 6, 7 years ago, ages before this new generation of JS frameworks. And it still leads in areas like data management, defining APIs for paging, sorting, and searching that I don't see mentioned anywhere in Ember.data, things that will be especially useful for showing the transactions in an account (if I go to a chart of accounts report now on certain accounts and don't put in a filter for date, I need to wait for close to a minute for it to return a few thousand transactions!). And I really like the new encapsulated AMD (Asynchronous Module Definition) pattern, find it really effective for preventing conflicts with other libraries, keeping the memory footprint lightweight, and swapping out event libraries to target touch events and mouse events differently for different devices.
In particular, Dojo to me seems like a no-brainer because we can enrich the user experience with much nicer widgets, with some very small changes to the UI templates -- the declarative style of markup that Dojo provides makes this much simpler to get a whole bunch of easy wins.
And most of the things I see noted in the Understanding Ember pages (http://emberjs.com/guides/understanding-ember/the-view-layer/) have been in Dojo for years:
* Templates merged in the browser
* Automatic updates of content in templates, browser side (you do need to build a widget for this, but it's a very well-defined process)
* Event listeners (if anything, this sounds more complete in dojo -- with dojo/aspect, you can observe any function call, not just DOM events. Personally I use dojo/topic a lot, to create channels for pub/sub)
* Class definitions, widget lifecycles
So it strikes me that these are the arguments for going with Dojo:
* Can enhance the existing UI today, without needing to start from the ground up and rebuild the entire UI
* Can greatly improve a page/module at a time, without needing to build a single-page app
* Can still build towards a single-page app, perhaps with a bit more planning necessary around DOM event delegation and re-rendering triggers
* Widgets and systems already written and easy to deploy today, for handling thousands of rows of data, doing effective browser-side searches, sorts, and filtering with co-operation with the server side code
* Decent charting library that can leverage the same data models we use for raw data display
Cheers,
John Locke
http://www.freelock.com
On 07/30/2013 08:47 AM, Mikkel Høgh wrote:
Hi there,
I've not been very involved with LedgerSMB development so far, since I'm not really a Perl guy, but I have in fact been considering starting a project to build a modern _javascript_ app as a replacement for the current LSMB interface.
I think the two best framework choices for this at the moment are Angular or Ember.js. I'm really impressed about what the Discourse guys have managed to accomplish with Ember.js (the forum at http://try.discourse.org/ is in fact a single page app, but it does certainly not feel like it).
I have built a few apps with Ember, so that would be my choice, but no matter what _javascript_ framework is picked, I am willing to help out build it.
On 30/07/2013, at 15.13, Brian Wolf <..hidden..> wrote:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------John makes some good points.
>>it's pretty trivial to switch between a menu bar and a tree widget.I've developed with Dojo and can validate John's statement. It also us the ability to provide multiple themes or layouts, letting each installation choose the one they want to use.
On 07/30/2013 05:34 AM, herman vierendeels wrote:
Sounds like we're in agreement that substantial progress can be made in upgrading the user experience, and that a _javascript_ library like Dojo is a good place to start. One-page applications have the advantage of a more desktop-application-like experience, with less page refreshes (a visual encumbrance). However, my experience is that one-page apps can easily become heavy and are far more difficult to test (case set-up alone is tedious). One gigantic page may not be the answer, but several medium-size pages (one for each area of the app) may be a reasonable compromise. It facilitates testing and also independent development by various community members.
Thanks.
Brian
<activus_logo_small.png>Brian WolfPhone: 410.367.2958Email: ..hidden..Try out Activus Secure Payments™, our recurring payments application.Demo at http://demo.activustech.com
I would like to have dojo added to current trunk. so we can 'probably try out a few different paradigms' By the time we ever reach production-stage , history-api might be fully implemented in all browsers http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/browsers.html#dom-history-replacestate 2013/7/29 John Locke <..hidden..>:On 07/29/2013 07:36 AM, Brian Wolf wrote:Perhaps the "common denominator" of an area of the application. For example, in AR lots of functionality surrounds the customer; in AP, the vendor. There's probably much overlap in selecting an entity, viewing (perhaps a dashboard) basic information about it, and performing operations on that entity (eg, receiving a payment). It might be effective to have a one-page for a specific area of the application. On 07/29/2013 09:49 AM, Chris Travers wrote:One thing I would ask is that if we go with a multi-page design, what are the aspects of one-page design that we should be looking into incorporating?I think the natural place to start is with overview lists -> detail views. In many cases, being able to see multiple transactions at once is very helpful. Having some panes for viewing/editing data, possibly some modal dialogs for data entry, and similar can be really helpful. I've got a pretty sizeable single-page app we use for much of our business, but it keeps the page paradigm -- pages get loaded into tabs which may be opened or closed. We've pretty much ignored the challenges Brian pointed out with state across refreshes -- as an internal app, we just take you back to a launch tab on refresh, you have to open up whatever you need. I did have a browser history manager partially implemented that would re-open tabs you had closed when you hit the back button -- but it wasn't high enough value for us to get fully working. In any case, converting the multiple pages into more usable standalone pages is clearly the next step. I think it's eventually worth experimenting with single-page apps, but not necessarily immediately, and make sure whatever UI we come up with ends up with a consensus before making it official -- probably try out a few different paradigms and see what we all like. Whatever we do, I think the app should be able to fall back to multiple pages, e.g. with js off, or with a lighter UI version for mobile, or whatever. Brian mentioned earlier a drop-down menu instead of a tree -- I was planning to just replace the current tree with a Dojo tree, which does use a cookie to remember previous state of expand/collapse. This seems like a really good place to start our experiments -- once we have the menu in a store, it's pretty trivial to switch between a menu bar and a tree widget. So is there any further objection to adding Dojo to the current trunk? The version I've put in my git repo does currently weigh in at 62M -- though currently it's adding around 140K to the page loads I've set up so far... Happy to see a few other developers on the list with Dojo experience! Cheers, John Locke http://www.freelock.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ See everything from the browser to the database with AppDynamics Get end-to-end visibility with application monitoring from AppDynamics Isolate bottlenecks and diagnose root cause in seconds. Start your free trial of AppDynamics Pro today! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=48808831&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Ledger-smb-devel mailing list ..hidden.. https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ledger-smb-devel------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Get your SQL database under version control now! Version control is standard for application code, but databases havent caught up. So what steps can you take to put your SQL databases under version control? Why should you start doing it? Read more to find out. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=49501711&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Ledger-smb-devel mailing list ..hidden.. https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ledger-smb-devel
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