OpEd: Watch your research: they may not realize they’re wrong
As mentioned previously, I’m doing a bit of AJAX research, with a specific slant on implementing it in ASP.Net.
I’ve gotten familiar with the AJAX concept in a general sense and while I’ve been waiting for my Visual Studio .Net 2003 software to come in, I figured I could at least hammer out some/most of the client-side logic. So I happily went about developing a dummy page and creating some JavaScript to make it do cool things. Case in point: I have a summary level list w/ a button to expand the summary to show the details. Only one summary is allowed open at any time and the js tracks if something has changed on any detail and even prompts for a save if another summary is attempted to be open. I’m pretty proud of myself.
So what’s this have to do with my title?
I was reading an article on using ASP.Net’s Postback for AJAX stuff, “Outpost: Postback over XmlHTTP.” I haven’t gotten too far…really not much farther than the introduction. I’ll edit this if I see I’m mistaken. But I have a beef with an assumption the author makes:
With AJAX you would call a web service to retrieve an array containing the subfolder names, links and icons and create the tree nodes using DHTML. You would have to create the web service methods, write cross-browser JavaScript to make it work and have hidden fields in your ASP.NET WebForm containing the state of the control.
Hrm. Well, actually you don’t need hidden fields in your form. I’ve quite successfully tracked two forms of state changes, simply using javascript variables. Now, granted, I haven’t integrated the server calls yet, but unless I’ve totally misunderstood the way things work, making a HTTP request won’t touch my variables. It’s not a page load, so nothing should be wiped from memory.
There are other bits of the article I’m not too keen on either…but I don’t know that I have a proper rebuttal for them. (i.e. “but it is not so cool, if you use 95% of the time on testing in different browsers” …um…isn’t a good portion of any web-project cross-browser testing & debugging? maybe that’s just me…).
Maybe it’s because I’m not in the “.Net Camp” but a lot of the article seems awfully narrow and without regard to other methodologies or technologies. Yes, it is about .Net technology, but the author doesn’t seem to be aware of any other technology. I think I’ll read this article with an eye of wariness.