Details Emerge on Echo3

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, September 3, 2007 @ 10:53 am

Some hopeful news on Echo3:

• First, it is close to a release.
• Second, there are more developers working on it.
• Next, they have a new web container architecture:

In Echo2, we used the client as a remote “canvas”, upon which to “render” the state of an application that was running on a server. We sometimes did this by sending down blocks of XHTML code, instructing the client to add the new code to its DOM. We sometimes did this by sending XML directives that would invoke JavaScript code to render an HTML representation of a component on the client. In both cases, the client did not have any real information about what components were being rendered to it. It was simply used as a display.

[...]

With Echo3, the client gets smart. The first step was to create a version of Echo that ran entirely on the client, that is, a JavaScript version of Echo. This has been done to such an extent that, if desired, Echo 3.0 applications can be developed in client-side JavaScript without the need for a server at all (this topic will be discussed at length later).

The mission of Echo 3.x is still to enable advanced web-based application development in server-side Java code, just as it was with 2.x. Just like in 2.x, the developer is not required to write any client-side JavaScript. From the end-developer's perspective, this still works in 3.x in the same way it did with 2.x. You still write server-side, object-oriented and event-driven Java code, and the application state magically appears on the client. Behind the scenes though, the process by which application state is synchronized between the client and server is quite a bit different.

In Echo3, we serialize the state of an application between client and server. As we now have the application framework running on the client as well, this is quite easy to do.

As another poster observed, it should be possible to write Echo3 apps in other languages besides Java on the server side, plus it looks like writing components will be much simplified.

I'm still waiting to hear, though, how the community will be able to contribute to Echo3, rather than the current wandering wiki/forum zip file.

Time to update and extend the tutorial.

Technorati Tags: ajax, echo2, echo3

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