Ted Leung on web app design patterns

"Avi Bryant’s keynote took its root in his experiences building Trendly. As one might expect, Avi started building Trendly using Seaside. But by the time he finished, he noticed that very little of Seaside was actually being used. He attributed this to the fact that Trendly’s architecture involves loading a single HTML, with a ton of Javascript. That Javascript then manages all of the interaction with the server, which consists of snippets of JSON data. This range true to me because we used a similar architecture for Chandler Hub, the web based version of Chandler (our interaction with the server was based on atom and atompub, not JSON), and it’s the kind of architecture that GMail is based on."

The same has been true for us (Mesa Analytics) in most of our web applications. Sometimes we do have "multi-page" web apps, but each of the individual pages typically follows the pattern above: load, then let JavaScript drive a bunch of task-specific server interactions.

Between Ted's summary of DjangoCon 2009 and the chatter about Tornado, it has been an interesting week for web application developers.