Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits

essiene — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:23:23 -0000

Interestingly, I have been going down a similar path, only using Erlang/Mnesia/Mochiweb/JSON/Python.

In my case, I differentiate b/w the ApplicationServer (Erlang/Mochiweb) that handles the actual logic of my applications. I call to the appserver via REST and get JSON replies.

I then have a UI Server, which is built with a Python framework, currently Pylons/Simplweb. This actually just serves up what I call UI Apps, which are basically orthogonal applications very heavy in Javascript.

So in a typical scenario, when you hit the home page for my application, you'll hit the UI server which will return the Login page to you. This page is actually fully Javascripted and when you hit submit button, the Javascript will make a REST call to the appserver to authenticate you. If the JSON sent back indicates success, we use document.location to redirect you to the next UI app in the sequence. Each UI app is almost independent of the other, and so forth.

I've been distilling this architechture slowly over the past 4 months, and I have some unanswered questions in my head, but also, I have some very cool gems, like the way I use contracts b/w the appserver and the UI apps. Each JSON response is actually a structure containing, version info, type info, and some other parameters, so my Javascript processing them begins to closely resemble pattern matching in Erlang.

All in all, like you say... its interesting, its new, but there are lots of kinks to work out in the way. I like the way you make all your HTML static, while I still have some bits supplied by templates, I think your approach is superior in this regard, as it has less moving parts.

Someone should give this method a name and actually start studying it.

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Re: Tech Tuesday: The Fiddly Bits