I’m working on an AJAXy project (Dojo and Rails, if the particulars matter). There are several places where the user should be able to sort, group, and filter results. There are also places where a user fills out a short form and the resulting item gets added to a list on the same page.
The non-AJAXy implementation works fine — the view layer server-side already knows how to render this stuff, so it can just do it again in a different order or with an extra element. This, however, adds lots of burden to the server.
So we switched to sending JSON from the server and doing lots of (re-)rendering client-side. The downside is that now we have duplicate code for rendering every page: once in Rails, which was built for this, and once in Dojo, which was not. The latter is basically just string concatenation.
So question part one: is there a good Javascript MVC framework we could use to make the rendering on the client-side more maintainable?
And question part two: is there a way to generate the client-side views in Javascript and the server-side views in ERB from the same template? I think that’s what the Pragmatic Programmers would do.
Alternatively, question part three: am I completely missing another angle? Perhaps send JSON from the server but also include the HTML snippet as an attribute so the Javascript can do the filtering, sorting, etc. and then just insert the given fragment?
Number 5 in my list of five AJAX styles tends to work pretty well.