While investigating AJAX, Groboclown has come up with something completely different. All of his HTML is generated with pure client side AJAX.

I've turned it into an experiment with pure client-side AJAX - no server-side code to generate the HTML. All server requests are only to gather data, not to have additional logic used in the user's display.

Though he describes his current implementation as "brain-dead", it doesn't take much imagination to see how to turn his Javascript implementation of the MVC pattern into something far more useful. Here is how it is done;

• Model holds data from the server
• The controller gets data from the server and updates the model
• The view has and HTML template to render the data and another component to update data.

Getting the view right took the longest time to get right. It does rely on CSS but all in all one has to admit that this is an interesting experiment. Check it out for yourself.

Different, but do you see a reason for his effort? Why mess with js? Am I missing some point?

As the title says, there are another alternatives, like JackBe, which has been in the market long before Groboclown started his efforts. Jack, the point is to reduce bandwith usage, as only data is traveling between server and client, not format and data (which is what HTML does). Peace.

For me it's nothing new or 'radically different' at all actually: Using GWT, I do exactly the same. Only I write all client-side code in Java too. With some limitations on the allowed Java things, which are somewhat annoying from time to time; and I'm feeling the constraints of such a static language such as Java when I *know* that some of the things which I want can be done so easily in a dynamic language as Javascript... but hey overall it works well for me and GWT allows me to share source-code between client and server, which is a boon for me too. For me it works very well that all exchange between client and server, apart from the initial transfer of the GUI code, is data and service-calls. It's the next step in web development and I like it. Regards, --Tim

How is this fundamentally different from the plethora of AJAX frameworks that exist today? In my personal usage of AJAX, data is returned from the server inside a JSON construct which JavaScript uses to update the screen. This method executes extremely fast. Isn't JSON or XML data the normal way to use AJAX? Is everyone else returning HTML?

Hi, I also wrote something similar and donated it to apache myfaces. I tried to reuse as much of the JSF specification as made sense, only the implementation works on the client rather than the server. Here's a link: http://www.mail-archive.com/dev at myfaces dot apache dot org/msg18916.html Cheers, - Ole