COWS Ajax - Ajax Evolved 142
nuttzy writes, "COWS Ajax takes over where Ajax leaves off. The web has gone through a great period of experimentation and there is now a dizzying array of frameworks, add-ons, howtos, and books. The common drawback these Ajax aids all fail to overcome is that, even with aids, apps take a long time to create and debug. Many times someone has already created a great tool and you'd really just rather use theirs instead of reinventing it (especially if it's a Google, Yahoo, or other trusted player). Wouldn't it be great to drop in a single line of code to gain a huge amount of functionality that frees you for something else? You can't do that with Ajax, but you can with COWS (Changeable Origin Web Services) Ajax. Now highly interactive third party services like SpellingCow are possible."
Not a developer (Score:5, Insightful)
- Does it work if the embedded page is offline?
- Does it slow down if the embedded page is under heavy load from somebody else?
- Does it break if some standard/lib/implementation/EULA changes?
- Can we customize it to our GUI?
- In the example given, how does it play with browserspellcheckers like the one coming in FF2.0?
- Why are we paying you if all you do is reuse thirdparty code wich doesnt belong to the company?
You get the idea. Not saying its a bad idea but I have my concerns and so would a lot of managers/devs. At least the ones I have the pleasure to work with.
drawback (Score:2, Insightful)
And there I was, thinking that the common drawback was the lack of accessibility for disabled people and those of us who like to use links or the back button...
Fatal Flaw? (Score:3, Insightful)
if Craig Nuttal is reading this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not a developer (Score:5, Insightful)
You ever heard of libraries? Sheesh, you should pay the man more if he found a way to increase productivity for next to nothing.
Oh come on (Score:4, Insightful)
From the spell checker:
That's so very AJAX.
DO NOT USE THIS (Score:5, Insightful)
It really is asking for trouble, once you have third party javascript on your site you are
basically at the mercy of whoever wrote that javascript.
They can do nice stuff, and not so nice stuff with your end users (popups, form content
hijacking and so on).
And possibly lots of stuff that I have not even thought of. Also, they're pretty much
in control of the timing on your site, some browsers do not display the page until all
java script has loaded and if you are loading it from a remote server then you are
basically as slow as that server.
Re:drawback (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Yay! One more buzzword!!! (nt) (Score:5, Insightful)
That's brilliant.
Now third party websites can offer to check my spelling and eavesdrop on my conversations with only one line of code!
I know I'm excited.
A different way of making web apps (Score:2, Insightful)
Really bad idea! (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously, by doing this, I'm not only trusting this bovine-fixated individual to not only (a) never change his API, (b) always be up, (c) never do evil things with my data, but also (d) actively prevent evil things from being done with my data.
Consider for a moment that you write an email client that "leverages" this technology. In this situation, not only are you handing your logs, you're also potentially passing your customer's email and passwords to this cow-speller.
Bad fucking idea...
Not really... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Fatal Flaw? (Score:4, Insightful)
Overall, it seems to me like a solution to a problem that just doesn't exist. There are already ways to access web services from the server-side (SOAP, XML-RPC, REST, and so on). To make use of these sources with AJAX, you just need to code some AJAX glue to tie it together. Using the toolkits that most languages have now, this can literally be 5 or 10 lines of code.
You also get to control the code that gets returned - set your own timeout (server-side) for fetching data from the web service; not have to worry about the hosting site going down and possibly breaking your app; not worrying about the remote end getting comprimised (since it would be a bright shiny target, and you don't know anything about their security); not worry about them shutting down operations, switching to a pay-per-use model (see above), changing the API in a non-BC way, etc.
Re:Slow? (Score:3, Insightful)
Its just...the tried, tested and true way of doing thing, ajax or not
Re:Really bad idea! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:DO NOT USE THIS (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not a developer (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow. That last question of yours would make some developers -- the best ones -- walk away from the job.
It's more like a remotely-hosted library. And no, the page would likely NOT work if that other server was down. A good developer could probably add some code to check the remote site and disable certain features on-the-fly if needed. I've done that for a lot of Salesforce stuff I do. Not too awful.
Seems like it would.
Not sure, because I don't know what you're referring to. Do you mean, what happens if you change a library on your own server? Probably shouldn't hurt -- it's all client-side JavaScript. If you mean, what happens if the site that hosts the JavaScript code changes a license or how a library works, then yes, that could likely screw you up.
Looks like a qualified yes.
It's not aware of the spellchecker in Firefox 2.0. But neither are any of the other spelling tools. This spelling tool works live on the text, and if you had Firefox 2.0 spellchecking it also, you'd simply have 2 tools running spellchecks. That could make for some interesting interface weirdness, but I doubt it would hurt anything.
That question is so completely insulting to a developer -- it so trivializes their attempt to do something smart and useful for you -- that if you asked that question, developer morale would immediately plummet. If you have ever asked such a question in the past, you need to know that your company has lost productivity because of it. Even if it never resulted in a missed deadline. Once you insult your developers, they're not going to want to work hard for you. They're going to stop caring. Do something smart and get insulted? OK, stop trying to be smart. If you've ever had to limit your scope or drop features or push out a deadline or worse, and such a thing happened after you asked such a question, now you know why. If you've ever released something that was buggier than people expected, or more difficult to refactor than the developers expected, you can probably bet that a member of your team was insulted and stopped caring.
Any question that is basically a "sounds like you're useless" kind of question is self-destructive to ask. Anyone with self-esteem will not accept it. You know how useful your developers are by their output. Do they hit deadlines? Do they build the things that are needed? Is the uptime good? Is the bug count low? Are the customers happy? Think about it. How are you going to feel if the developer replies to you by saying, "all you seem to do is push pencils around, so why are we paying you again?"
(And if you're inclined to respond by saying, "Unfair question, because I don't just push pencils, I provide real value!" ...then you understand the argumentative feeling you've instilled in your developers.)
Dejavascript Vu (Score:3, Insightful)