Question

Several frameworks for writing web-based desktop-like applications have recently appeared. E.g. SproutCore and Cappuccino. Do you have any experience using them? What’s your impression? Did I miss some other framework?

I’ve seen related questions on StackOverflow, but they generate mostly standard answers like ‘use jQuery or MochiKit or MooTools or Dojo or YUI’. While some people give non-standard answers, they seem to have little experience using this frameworks.

Can anyone share real experience developing destop-like apps for the browser?

Answer 1

Due to the speed issues these high-level frameworks cause for many larger (as in: non-trivial) applications, we only use plain jQuery. In our tests, all high-level frameworks broke down in situations where there are many draggable objects or many drop targets, and in situation where long lists (with >1000 entries) were shown on screen.

Part of this is due to issues with IE6 and IE7 (where performance suddenly starts to deteriorate dramatically after DOM trees reach a certain complexity), but part is due to the overhead these frameworks generate.

So I would not recommend any of the high-level frameworks. My recommendation would be to use jQuery and work with the DOM directly.

Some tips to improve performance:

• Where possibly, render HTML on the server.
• Keep the HTML as simple as possible.
• Avoid having many elements in the DOM tree.
• Avoid recursive table structure (IE suddenly stops showing them after relatively few levels of nesting).
• Remove invisible elements from the DOM tree.
• Remove things from the DOM tree before changing them and then re-insert them, rather than changing them while they’re in the tree.