Submitted by Echo2 is an open source Java web development framework that aims to simplify the development of web applications using the AJAX model. I read the online tutorial, downloaded the library and wrote a simple test application to see if Echo2 lives up to its promise.
what a terrible article – writing up someone “download and mess with” experiences. certainly not useful to the intended audience – what advantages does it have, what disadvantages, the scope..
by the way – wikipedia’s entries on AJAX are very good. that’s the quality i’d like to see.
having said that – it looks like something we’ll think about when an appropriate project comes up.
Yes, it’s not really an interesting read. I was however impressed by the demo apps on http://www.nextapp.com/products/echo2/demo/
It’s nice to see all these webapp frameworks around these days. Too bad my isp only supports PHP. (Nothing wrong with PHP, but goodlooking frameworks like RoR, Subway, Django and this one are not PHP.)
I wasn’t impressed.
Why does a demo written in (hopefully) standard Javascript only run on MSIE and FF? Why not Mozilla, or Camino (which even use THE SAME engine as Firefox)??
This is just sad. And I won’t even start talking about Opera and Safari or Konqueror (those three also JS-compliant I presume)…
Ulrich Hobelmann
It states the following on the demo page:
“Echo2 is designed to work with Mozilla (including Firefox)”
So, where did you get the idea that it won’t run on Mozilla?
-G
In Camino I get only a white screen (i.e. nothing).
It’s the same Gecko rendering engine all right.
Ulrich
Just noticed that I got a blank page because I have cookies deactivated by default. The demos are pretty cool, they only need a better way to tell the user that he needs to switch on cookies
Ulrich
I found no problems testing it with Mozilla 1.7.
People are doing cool stuff like this with rather feeble capabilities of current browsers. Just something like XmlHTTPRequest (which Microsoft created) has caused a rather large improvement in the quality of webapps, but the browser is still quite limited in what it can accomplish as a rich client.
The problem is that HTML forms are quite limited. We need things like XAML and XUL, but standard in IE and Mozilla-based browsers.
I also think what we need is a small standard platform-neutral VM in the browser. And I’m not talking about .NET or Java. I’m talking something small. Javascript is alright, but its not ideal IMO.
I used to think that the browser as an application platform was somewhat of a fad, but it’s become clear to me that the deployment advantages of the browser are just too attractive.
Anyway, the demos were pretty nice. I think I’ll check out the SDK.
The demos work for the most part in Opera, with a few rendering bugs. I don’t know if the bugs arise from the framework or from the browser (or both).