On the client side, MapFish had to make several choices in order to propose one framework for building Rich Internet Applications. The main criteria of this choice was the flexibility, the completeness, the multi browser support and the power. There are probably several technologies or libraries that are able to meet these criteria, so, at the end, a choice is needed. For MapFish, the choice was to use OpenLayers, ExtJS and GeoExt as JavaScript libraries.
And now, the famous questions: Why not JQuery ? Why not Flash/Flex ? Why not Dojo ? Why not etc, etc... ? Easy answer: a choice had to be made. For more arguments, I propose to read two very interesting blogs:
- JQuery and/or ExtJS I like the neutral approach and arguments.
- And of course, the famous blog of Steve Job. I like the non neutral approach and some of the arguments. Of course Adobe has an answer. But about this answer, sorry, I can't believe the sentence "Create once and deploy on multiple devices". It's per definition wrong, other why would you have multiple devices if you would have always the same application ? Needs are different, users are differents, expectations are different... so applications will be different. It's a nice sentence, but it's not the reality. And if Adobe has 8 millions download of Flash per day, it's probably because users have always the wrong flash version installed....
1 comment:
Thanks for the explanations.
After more than two years since that post, I was wondering if there are plans to jQuery migration. I know there are other projects[1] do it with success... I would use MapFish but avoiding ExtJS.
[1]: https://github.com/alohaeditor/Aloha-Editor/issues/55
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