OpenThought AJAX Library

1.99.16 08.25.2007 - 15:03  

We're closing in on a new release! In the meantime, here's a new development snapshot containing the latest bugfixes. Check it out in the downloads section.

1.99_07 08.31.2006 - 00:15  

In honor of John Jewitt's talk at YAPC, I've released a new version that fixes a few bugs, and probably introduces a few more :-) An interesting feature John got me thinking about is the ability to append data to a given field, instead of overwriting it by default. You now have the choice. You can download it in the downloads section.

OpenThought Rethunk 07.19.2005 - 13:35pm  

It's been almost a year since any serious OpenThought development has taken place. Have you ever just had that feeling that you were treading water when you coded? I just didn't feel that OpenThought was where I wanted it. Or even what I wanted out of it.

For someone trying to make use of OpenThought's primary feature -- a simply API for designing web pages that don't have to reload -- you get stuck with a bunch of other things. Not the least of which is OpenPlugin.

OpenPlugin had it's time and place. It was kinda neat. But it hasn't really taken off, and there's a lot of other neat Perl-based frameworks out there, lessening the need or usefulness of OpenPlugin. It's not really beneficial for it to try and compete with the existing popular frameworks out there, when I could make use of an existing framework, and put my efforts into that. So, I'm pondering the exact fate of OpenPlugin, but I'm leaning towards marking it as deprecated on CPAN, and seeing if an existing framework could use it's code.

So, what's left is OpenThought. After mulling it over for a year or so, I've finally figured out what would be best for it. And the result will be OpenThought 2. It's still in development, but is moving fast towards a stable release. Changes in OpenThought 2:

• No dependencies, outside of what comes with Perl.
• The single frame is gone. You'll now include an OpenThought2.js file in your HTML, and based on what browser you have, it'll either use the XMLHttpRequest/XMLHTTP methods available in newer browsers, or it will fall back to dynamically creating iframes.
• With the above, there's no longer a limitation of how many connections can be open at one time.
• Serious JavaScript code cleanup: while much of the code remains the same, it's been very much refactored. It uses OO JavaScript, and is far cleaner than the previous codebase.
• The Perl code has been refactored as well, and is now just a single module.
• There is an optional browser-based Log Window that can be enabled, which can log at various log levels, depending on how much output you want. This can really help in debugging.
• A bunch of additional new features have been added as well, such as the ability to do both GET and POST requests, the ability to use wildcards for the names of fields to send to the browser as parameters, the ability to send in arrays instead of multiple parameters, and a whole host of other features and cleanup.
• The docs have really been cleaned up too, a lot of cruft has been removed in the hopes of getting you up and running quicker

This is about all I've done during the past two weeks, and I think you'll really like the changes. Feel free to download OpenThought-1.99_03.tar.gz. Also, the OpenThought Demo is using this new codebase. Give it a shot, and let me know what you think.