Monday, March 31, 2008

There's a working group that just started up called the Thin Server Architecture Working Group (ok, it's just three folks that are getting together to discuss things, but it's a start). It looks like it's going to be a higher level discussion than related W3C activities (which are more focused on standards discussions). InfoQ has a good one page summary of what's out there for the working group today (which isn't much).

Here's my issue though... my current role is all about the delivery of a Rich Internet Application (RIA), and I have some fundamental issues with the standards and implementations today:

Storage of the "View" - The Thin Server Architecture Working Group is all about the idea of pushing the interface logic to the client. That's very good... but something needs to provide that logic to the client (hint: the server). They need to be sure to consider that part of the architectural models in their work.

Current Client Rendering Performance - HTML clients have some serious performance limitations today. DOM manipulation seems to have been considered a secondary performance goal until recently. Flash and Silverlight are certainly able to handle the visual aspects of the presentation effeciently, and they both offer opportunities for fairly effecient display logic to be imbedded, but I'd like to see the browsers step up their DOM handling efforts.

Developer Optimization - I know that many, many developers and architects look at the MVC model as being superior to the "everything in one block of code" model (I made that one up, but you know what I mean). That's absolutely true, but one belefit of the "everything in one block of code" model is initial development (not maintenance development) can be performed as a stream of thought. Because of this, many younger or less experienced developers will start to learn some very bad habits as soon as they start coding for the web. Tools for RIA development need to help with the seperation of logic layers (not necessarily the MVC model), and at the same time feel natural to code.

Standards and working groups are very important, but the most important part of any architecture, specification or design pattern is how they get implemented in the real world.

Labels: ajax, design patterns, process, web 2.0