Rich internet applications

Looking at a webSockets implementation this evening, I was hit with the light.

The app we're building at work is not really an HTML page. That is the underlying transport layer, but really what we have is a javascript application that has its UI written in HTML. There is a single page, and different parts of it are loaded and unloaded in response to a user's actions. When the application needs data, it AJAXes back to the server for some JSON, and occasionally an HTML template or some new script.

This paradigm corresponds with a number of MVVM frameworks that are very popular these days, such as Backbone, Knockout, or Ember. Your web layer is really a javascript application running in the browser, and the app server just feeds it the data it needs to run.

What bothered me is that I felt that was unwieldy. Most of the really good app layer frameworks are MVC. You put an MVC framework on the app server with an MVVM framework in the client and you have way too many layers. I've been working on Kul as kind of a way of making simpler MVC frameworks, but it still feels to me that adding MVVM on top would be more complexity than you need.

Then I thought about web sockets. If you think of hitting a website as the initial application download, then web sockets become the data connection for your application. You could open a web socket, keep it open for the life of the app, and have that be your data connection.

That's really what Google does with docs and gmail. It's no longer a webapp, it's a heavy client app with a continuous server connection and a HTML UI.

You could build your app on top of something like Ruby's EM-WebSocket, or maybe something simpler like SinatraWebsocket. The possibilities are endless, really. Instead of building huge rest interfaces for a web app that doesn't need it, build a client application! It's a horrible practice to re-use that structure for a rest client, anyway.

You can completely minimize your web app footprint, have better testing methodologies, and build a much less complex webapp this way. Instead of having AJAX calls scattered about your javascript (and you know they all work slightly differently) you streamline your server communication through one point. Data all gets requested through the same pipe.

I'm sure this is old hat for the rest of the world, but I thought it was amazing when I realized the benefits. This is the right way to do RIA.