The way to JavaScript RIA is paved with good technologies

As we are working with the Shanghai team, we found that they have different concepts about JavaScript RIA (also known as AJAX). Hong Kong team tends to have a better structure and more graceful way to partition the layers. On the other hand, Shanghai team tends to have less structure but faster development speed.

This leads to the classical design question about the tradeoff between development time and maintenance time.

For this reason, I listed out all possible combinations of different technologies and styles so that we can make the design decision from the beginning of the design stage in the future. The explanations will be added soon. To summarized, they are:

1. Communication Model
• Synchronous
• Asynchronous (AJAX)
2. Communication Style
• iFrame
• XMLHTTPRequest (XHR)
3. Push Communication Style
• iFrame
• HTTP 1.1 chunked
4. Transportation Protocols
• HTTP / REST
• XML-RPC
• SOAP
5. Data Format
• Plain Text
• HTML
• XML
• JSON
• Base64
6. UI Rendering
• Server Side Rendering
• Client Side Rendering
7. UI Update Style
• innerHTML Substitution
• DOM Manipulation