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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T15:49:09+00:00

This is a pretty generic question, but I come from a few years with

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This is a pretty generic question, but I come from a few years with Flex, and I am not so much experienced with pure web development.

My question is: if you need to build an AJAX app, which one of the two approaches you would prefer:

  1. classical server-side MVC, where controllers return views supplied with model data. Views can be full-blown or partial. Basically, there will be only a small number of full-blown views, which work as the containers, and javascript will help fill-in the gaps with partial HTML views asynchronously. This approach is one step further the traditional web development, as javascript is used only for maintaining the overall control and user interactions

  2. A full-blown js app, such as the ones built with Cappuccino, Sproutcore, or Backbone.js, where the client side is thick, and implements a client-side implementation of MVC that handles model as well, as controlling logi, and view interactions. Server-side in this case plays the role of a set of JSON/XML services with which the client exchanges data. The disadvantage in this case is that view templates have to be loaded at the beginning, when the initial application is bootstrapped, so that javascript can layout the markup based on the data. The advantages are the reduced weight of the server response, as well the better control within the client, which allows for stuff like view-model binding to be applied.

  3. A somewhat mixed approach between those two.

I am favoring the second one, which is normal, since I come from a similar environment, but with that one I a mostly concerned about issues such as url routing (or deeplinking as we call it in Flash), state management, modularity, and view layout (when do the view markup templates get loaded? Should there be specific server endpoints that provide those templates upon being called, so that the template data does not get loaded in the beginning?)

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  1. Editorial Team

    I would recommend the second approach. The second approach (thick client thin server approach ) which you are already familiar with is the preferred approach by an increasing number of modern developers because The rendering and management of widgets is done on the client and this saves computational and bandwidth overhead on the server. Plus if you have a case of complex widget management then using server side code for widgets can become increasingly complicated and unmanageable.
    The disadvantage pointed by you :

    view templates have to be loaded at the beginning, when the initial
    application is bootstrapped, so that javascript can layout the markup
    based on the data.

    is not correct. You can very well load static templates on the fly as required through ajax and then render them using javascript into full blown widgets.
    For example if you have an imagegallery with an image editor component then you may not load the files required for image editor (including images, templates and widget rendering code) until user actually chooses to edit an image.

    Using scriptloaders (eg. requirejs, labjs) you can initially load only a small to medium sized bootstrapping script and then load the rest of the scripts dynamically depending on the requirements.

    Also, powerful and mature server side widget libraries are only available for java backends (eg vaadin). If you are working on php,python or ruby backend then writing your own server side ui framework can be a serious overkill. It is much more convenient to use client side server-agonistic javascript ui frameworks eg. dojo, qooxdoo etc.

    You seem to have an inclination towards towards client side mvc frameworks. This is a nice approach but the dual mvc architecture (on server as well as well as client) often has a tendency to lead to code duplication and confusion. For this reason I wont recommend the mixed approach.

    You can have a proper mvc framework in the frontend and only a server side model layer that interacts with the application through a restful api (or rpc if you are so inclined).

    Since you are coming from flex background I would recommend you to check out Ajax.org ui platform http://ui.ajax.org . Their user interface framework is tag based like flex and though the project is new they have a powerful set of widgets and very impressive charting and data-binding solutions. Dojo and Ample SDK also adopt tag based widget layout system.

    Qooxdoo and extjs advocate doing everything from layouting and rendering through javascript which might be inconvenient for you.

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