Echo2 a Cult?

Dietrich Kappe, Friday, March 24, 2006 @ 9:00 am

Paul Browne has nice little survey post over at O'Reilly about Ajax frameworks. All's cool until I stumble across the following:

Echo2 - Evolution of original Echo Framework, can run in any Servlet container.
Original has cult following, but doubt if it will become the number 1
web framework.

I hear you, Paul. I remember evaluating Echo1 a long while back and thinking to myself: "why would you want to build a web application the way you would a component based desktop GUI? The behavior is so different, the lack of control, layout, look and feel, etc., etc." My conclusion was that Echo1 was a nice design solution applied to the wrong problem.

Fast forward to today. I have DHTML, CSS, Javascript, XHR, etc. I have complete control over what shows up in the browser, anywhere, any time, anyhow. I've got people writing thousands of lines of rich client application code, business tier logic leaking into the browser, cat and dogs living together...you get the idea.

Now the Echo design solution makes plenty of sense. The simple report and forms beast of the early 90's has turned into a kind of GUI desktop. Now my reaction is "why wouldn't you want to write a rich client web app the way you would write a component based desktop GUI?" It's a proven design. Nobody twiddles the bits by hand anymore. And when the browser wars start up again, the standards start diverging, and your Ajax apps start breaking, then the problem starts resembling that of a cross platform GUI, i.e. isolating Ajax variations in browser specific peer classes, much like AWT.

You can easily imagine running the same application as a Swing desktop GUI or a browser embedded Flash app. That's if the design is right and makes use of what? That's right, browser or rendering layer specific peers.

Guess who has all that today? That's right, Echo2. Come on and drink the Kool-Aid.

agile ajax

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