2005/11/23

Is Ajax gonna kill the web frameworks?

The Java eco system has zillions of web frameworks from JSF, Tapestry, Struts, WebWork, Spring WebFlow to things like JSP/JSTL/Velocity etc. There's probably a new web framework born every day in Java some place.

However if the world really does go Ajax or some kinda client technology very Ajax like - will that cause these traditional HTML/HTTP web frameworks to become legacy?

Web frameworks spend most of their time doing things like, dealing with HTTP and HTML, maintaining client side state on the server - handing intermediate form submissions & validation, templating/rendering issues and binding business objects to HTML form controls etc.

These days Ajax has template engines, XPath/XSLT engines, SOAP stacks, XForms implementations and so forth all done on the client side. You can do clever things like hide the JavaScript from your HTML page and use CSS to bind the JavaScript to the markup.

There's even a JavaScript version of Ruby on Rails that runs in the browser! :)

So is the web application of the future going to be static HTML & JavaScript, served up by Apache with Ajax interacting with a bunch of XML based web services (maybe using SOAP, maybe just REST etc)? If so, do we really need a web framework thats focussed on HTTP and HTML, or are we just gonna end up developing a bunch of XML based web services and letting Ajax do all the templating, editing and viewing?

Is this the end of web frameworks as we know it?

http://radio.weblogs.com/0112098/2005/11/16.html

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